The five core purposes of TPM in Confido — and how they connect.

The Trade module in Confido serves as the commercial and financial backbone of your trade promotion process. It is where all retailer and distributor promotions, funding agreements, and allowances live — and where they connect to your sales forecast, trade liability, deduction validation, and performance reporting.

There are five core purposes of the Trade module:

Navigating the different views of your promotional calendar.

The Trade Calendar is your source of truth for all active, upcoming, and historic trade agreements. There are four views to choose from, each serving a different purpose.

The default and most commonly used view. Shows every promotional event as a single row — even if that event has multiple promotion lines within it. You can expand an event to see all of its underlying lines.

From this view you can filter by planning group, PPG, promotion type, financial period, or any other attribute to hone in on what you need. You can also add custom columns (e.g., last updated date, contract ID) and export the full list to Excel.

A visual timeline showing when different promotions are running throughout the year. You can zoom in to a weekly view or out to a quarterly view. Hovering over a promotion shows high-level details.

Useful for quickly spotting gaps or overlaps in your promotional calendar, or for sharing a visual overview of upcoming activity. You can filter to a single planning group using the quick filter at the top.

The board view shows the lifecycle stages of all promotions in a Kanban-style layout. This view becomes most useful if your organization sets up an approval workflow. The stages are:

Approval rules can be configured to require sign-off before certain promotions become active. Common examples:

Approvers can review and approve promotions directly in the board view, or from the promotion detail page. Once approved, the promotion flows into the forecast and accruals automatically.

How to enter promotions — including planning group vs. ship-to level, common promotion types, and retailer-specific nuances.

Promotions are created from the Trade Calendar using the New Promotion button. Before entering the lines, there are two key decisions to make: the planning level and the promotion structure.

Every promotion is created at one of two levels, which determines what volume it is based on and which date type drives its lifecycle:

A promotion event is the top-level container. Within one event, you can have multiple promotion lines. Use separate lines when:

If you have a promotion that runs across two different periods (e.g., P1 and P2), you can either enter it as one event and use the auto-split rule to split by period, or manually use the 'Split by Period' button when creating. Each split generates its own line in the accruals view.

When creating a promotion line, the key fields are:

Some retailers (notably Whole Foods, and occasionally Kroger) charge scan back fees for additional days before and after the actual promotion window — even though no promotion tag is on the shelf during those days. Enter these in the 'Scan back days before' and 'Scan back days after' fields at the top of the promotion creation screen.

This ensures your trade spend forecast captures the full cost of those extra scan days, even though no lift is expected from them.

Whole Foods promotions have a specific structure that differs from most other retailers. The recommended approach for a standard Whole Foods promotion event is to create three lines:

The scan back days before and after are also commonly used for Whole Foods: typically 2 days before and 5 days after the promotion window.

For customers where you plan trade at a flat rate rather than event-by-event (e.g., a distributor with a 25% annual trade rate, or a retailer with a year-long EDLP allowance), you can create a single promotion spanning the full year:

Once a promotion is created, you can duplicate it to multiple other periods or copy it to the following year — without having to re-enter all the details. To do this, select the event in the list view and click Duplicate Event.

The duplicate will:

Draft status copies forward: if the original promotion is in draft, the duplicates will also be in draft and will not affect the forecast or accruals until submitted.

How promotions generate accruals, how to manage them month-to-month, and how deductions tie out against them.

When a promotion is created and approved, it generates accrual lines — one per promotion line per period. The Accruals module is where your team manages, books, adjusts, and closes these accruals as part of the monthly trade liability process.

Accruals are only generated when:

The accrual date is configurable per promotion type. The default is the buy-in date (i.e., when product ships, not when the promotion runs on shelf). This aligns the accrual with the shipment timing that drives your P&L recognition. You can also configure certain promotion types to accrue on the in-store event date if that better matches your accounting methodology.

Each accrual line in the list view shows:

At month-end, once all deductions have been tagged and the trade liability view looks accurate, you book the accrual. This is the point-in-time snapshot that gets posted to your ERP (e.g., SAP).

When you book an accrual:

Confido generates accrual recommendations to flag items that may need attention. These are configured in Trade Calendar Settings under 'Accruals Recommendations Logic.' The two main trigger types are:

Recommendations appear at the top of the Accruals view as a count (e.g., '3 medium recommendations'). They are also highlighted in the Status column on the relevant rows. You can filter the list to show only recommended items, review them, and bulk-accept to close multiple at once.

When you are satisfied that all deductions have been received and tagged, and the open balance is at or near zero, you close the accrual. Closing sets the open balance to $0 and moves the accrual to closed status.

After an accrual is closed, the trade reporting views (trade P&L, trade rate) reflect only the actual deductions received — not the original forecasted amount. This allows you to see your true favorability or overspend versus your original plan.

Deductions that arrive and are matched to a promotion are visible in the Accruals view under each promotion line. If a deduction was not auto-matched, you can manually tag it here.

The Deductions sub-view (accessible from within the Trade module) shows all deductions by period and lets you filter for untagged items. This is the primary tool for bulk tagging at month-end — filter to your relevant trade types and period, identify untagged deductions, and tag them to the appropriate promotion lines in bulk.

An AI-powered view that learns the typical lag between promotion execution and deduction arrival — to help you manage accruals more proactively.

The Deduction Timing view is an AI-powered feature within the Trade module that builds over time as deductions get tagged to promotions. Its purpose is to help your team understand how long it typically takes for a deduction to arrive after a promotion ends — by retailer — and use that to make smarter decisions about when to close accruals.

This view becomes more accurate over time as more deductions are tagged to promotions. Early in implementation, the data will be sparse; after several months of usage it becomes a meaningful planning tool.

The deduction timing data feeds into accrual recommendations — specifically the age-based threshold. If Confido knows that Target typically sends deductions within 18 days of a promotion ending, and it has been 60 days since your promotion ended with no deduction, it can flag the accrual as overdue and recommend closing it.

It also helps the trade team set realistic expectations for when deductions will arrive, reducing the need to manually track promotion status in spreadsheets.

Key reporting views for monitoring trade spend, performance, and liability.

The Trade module includes several reporting views that give your team visibility into how trade spend is tracking versus plan — and how your promotions are performing.

The Trade Summary view shows your gross-to-net sales structure — revenue, trade spend by type, and net sales — at any level of the hierarchy (total brand, retailer, PPG). This is your primary view for monitoring trade rate and comparing to your AOP or target.

While a promotion accrual is open, it holds the original forecasted spend amount. Once the accrual is closed, only actual deductions are reflected. This means trade rate reporting becomes most accurate after accruals for a period have been fully reviewed and closed.

The promotion performance view shows, for each promotion: what volume was planned, what actually scanned (from syndicated data), what lift was expected, what lift was observed, and what it cost versus what was forecasted. This is used for post-event analysis to inform future lift assumptions.

This view can be filtered and grouped by retailer, PPG, promotion type, or time period. It feeds directly into the historical bump chart used when setting lift expectations for new promotions.

A period-based view (as opposed to the list-based Accruals module) showing what was booked versus what actually came through for each period — column by column across the year. This view is more suited to retrospective reporting and month-over-month comparisons than to day-to-day accrual management.

Common questions from training sessions and onboarding calls.

Confido Trade Promotion Management — Internal Reference

For questions, contact your Confido onboarding team.