CONFIDO

Accounting Automation Suite

How It Works — Comprehensive Reference Guide

For internal team onboarding and customer reference

A plain-language explanation of the platform and its purpose.

Confido is an autonomous planning and accounting platform built specifically for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. It connects the full commercial and financial operation of a CPG brand — from sales forecasting and trade promotion management through to cash application, deductions processing, and ERP posting — in a single, integrated system.

The Accounting Automation Suite is the financial backbone of the platform. It eliminates the manual work of downloading remittances, classifying deductions, creating credit memos, and posting payments to your ERP by automating each of these steps and surfacing them as a daily review queue for your team.

Confido works with approximately 150 CPG brands today and integrates with all major US and Canadian retailer and distributor portals, as well as leading ERP systems.

Confido has two main product areas that work together:

These two sides are intentionally interconnected. The trade promotions entered by the sales team are used to automatically validate and match deductions on the accounting side. The more accurate the planning data, the more automation is possible on the back end.

Confido integrates with multiple ERP platforms. While the core workflow is consistent across all of them, some configuration details — such as how credit memos are structured, which custom fields are supported, and how dimensions are populated — vary by system.

How Confido connects to your customer portals, email, and ERP systems.

Everything in Confido starts with integrations. The platform connects to your customer and distributor portals, your AR email inbox, and your ERP — consolidating all payment and deduction data into one place automatically.

Confido has 70+ retailer and distributor portal integrations covering all major US and Canadian accounts. This includes all top-20 retailers and distributors such as Walmart, Target, Kroger, Costco, Publix, Meijer, UNFI, KeHE, and many more.

There are two types of portal connections:

For portals not yet in Confido's library, there is an AI-assisted 'unsupported portal' flow where you record your steps navigating the portal, and Confido uses this to build the integration — typically completing 90% of the setup automatically, with the Confido team finalizing the rest.

For customers who send remittance and deduction backup via email rather than through a portal (e.g., UNFI, Thrive Market, smaller regional accounts), Confido connects directly to your AR email inbox.

Confido integrates bidirectionally with your ERP. Every day, it pulls in:

On the posting side, Confido pushes back:

How Confido processes incoming customer payments from remittance to ERP posting.

The cash application workflow is the core of the Accounting Automation Suite. Instead of your team logging into each portal, downloading remittance files, and manually entering payments and deductions into your ERP, Confido handles the data collection and classification automatically — leaving your team with a streamlined review-and-post process.

Each day, Confido pulls in all available customer payments across all connected portals and email sources. Your team sees a single queue showing every payment received for the day, across all customers, in one place.

For each payment, Confido automatically:

For each invoice payment line on a remittance, Confido:

Once your team has reviewed a payment and is satisfied, they click to post. Confido then creates all the necessary transactions in the ERP simultaneously:

Confido supports both straight-through posting and clearing account workflows — and a hybrid of both within the same payment.

Confido can populate custom fields and financial dimensions on the transactions it creates in your ERP. Common examples include:

These fields can be set up as rules during onboarding — for example, 'when we receive a payment from Walmart, automatically populate the channel code as Mass and the customer code as WMT-US.' This means your team does not need to manually fill in these fields on each transaction.

Confido can handle customers who pay by credit card through payment processors (e.g., Versapay). The workflow is similar — Confido reads the payment information, matches to invoices, and processes deductions. The source of the payment data (portal, email, or processor) does not change the downstream workflow.

For customers still paying by check, your team can scan the check and drag and drop the scanned document directly into Confido. Confido will attempt to read the document and extract payment and deduction information. This provides a manual path for legacy payers that still flows through the same process and posting structure as automated customers.

Confido can connect to your bank feed (via Plaid for supported banks) to validate that payments brought in from portals have also been received in your bank account. This allows Confido to auto-populate deposit dates and confirm receipt without relying solely on portal data.

For brands with compressed month-end close timelines (e.g., reporting to a parent company within 3 days), Confido supports workarounds such as posting a high-level payment in the ERP directly while backup is pending, then reversing and reposting through Confido once the full remittance data becomes available.

How Confido classifies, organizes, splits, and validates customer deductions.

Deductions management is one of the most labor-intensive parts of the AR process for CPG brands. Customers take deductions for many different reasons — trade promotions, shortages, compliance fines, cash discounts, admin fees — and each one needs to be classified, validated, and coded to the right GL account. Confido automates the bulk of this work.

Confido maintains a library of 100+ standardized deduction reason codes covering every major category of deduction that CPG brands encounter. This includes:

Because every retailer and distributor uses different terminology on their remittances, Confido maintains an internal lookup library that maps each customer's specific language and codes to Confido's standardized reason codes. Your team sees consistent, standardized reasons regardless of which customer the deduction came from.

During onboarding, you map Confido's standardized reason codes to the GL accounts or credit memo items you use in your ERP. For example:

Once this mapping is in place, every time Confido classifies a deduction to a reason code, it automatically knows which GL account to use when posting the credit memo. Your team does not need to select accounts manually on each deduction.

If a deduction comes through with a reason that has not yet been mapped, Confido flags it and the posting is paused for that line until the mapping is completed — which can be done in real time directly in Confido.

Many customer deductions — particularly MCBs (multi-customer bills), distributor EDLPs, and large promotional deductions — span multiple product lines, retailers, or both. Confido automatically splits these deductions into individual lines based on your configured preferences.

The most common splitting configuration is by product line (PPG) and retailer. For example, a single KeHE deduction for $30,000 might be split into:

Each split line can then be individually matched to the relevant trade promotion in the system.

When Confido brings in deduction backup from a portal or email, it reads the document and extracts structured data wherever available. Common fields extracted include:

This extracted data powers automatic promotion matching, populates the description field on credit memos, and enables detailed reporting without manual data entry.

For trade-related deductions, Confido automatically attempts to match each deduction (or split line) to a promotion in the trade calendar. Matching is scored based on:

If a strong match is found, the deduction is automatically tagged to the promotion. This links the deduction to the accrual on that promotion and allows for real-time tracking of plan vs. actual trade spend.

If no match is found above the configured threshold, the deduction is flagged. Depending on your configured rules, it may be routed to the sales owner of that account for review and approval before posting.

Confido creates a feedback loop between the accounting team and the sales team around deductions. If a deduction comes through that exceeds a configured dollar threshold and has no matching promotion in the system, it is automatically routed to the sales owner of that account.

The sales person receives a notification, can view the deduction backup, and responds with whether the deduction is valid or invalid. This workflow:

Confido supports customizable status labels on deductions that your team can use for internal record-keeping. These are separate from the ERP posting status and can be used however your team finds useful — for example, 'Pending backup,' 'Dispute filed,' 'Awaiting sales approval,' 'Complete.' Custom status labels can be created and renamed at any time.

How Confido identifies invalid deductions and automatically files disputes on your behalf.

For many CPG brands, disputing invalid deductions is a significant source of recoverable revenue — but the manual process of pulling proof, filing disputes, and tracking responses is time-consuming and often deprioritized. Confido automates this process end to end.

For shortage deductions (the most common use case), the automated dispute flow works as follows:

All disputes — whether automatically filed or manually initiated — are tracked in Confido's disputes dashboard. At any point in time, your team can see:

When a repayment is received, Confido automatically links it to the original deduction or dispute and handles the accounting treatment — so the repayment offsets the original deduction in your ERP rather than creating a standalone transaction.

Even without the automated disputes add-on, your team can manually initiate disputes directly from within Confido. This keeps all dispute activity in one system and still provides lifecycle tracking and reporting.

How Confido connects trade promotions to accounting accruals and tracks spend in real time.

One of the most powerful aspects of having planning and accounting in the same system is the ability to manage trade accruals collaboratively and in real time — eliminating the end-of-month scramble to reconcile deductions against Excel-based accrual schedules.

Accruals in Confido are built up from the trade calendar. Every promotion that a sales person enters in Confido has an estimated cost. At month-end, the accounting team can review the full list of promotions executing or shipping in that month, lock the accrual, and export the journal entry to post in the ERP.

For year-long or quarterly promotions (common for EDLPs and distributor allowances), Confido automatically splits the total accrual into monthly amounts — so your GL is not hit with one large lump sum in the first month of a multi-month agreement.

As deductions come in and are matched to promotions, Confido updates the actual spend against each accrual line in real time. At any point in time, your team can see:

This view is available at any level — by individual promotion, by retailer, by product line, by salesperson, or rolled up to total trade. Customizable views allow teams to save their preferred reporting layouts.

For brands with access to point-of-sale (POS) data, Confido can use actual in-store scan data to estimate what a promotion will cost before the deduction arrives. If a BOGO at Publix generated twice the expected lift, Confido can flag that your accrual is likely to be significantly under — giving your accounting team the opportunity to true up the accrual in the same period rather than taking a surprise hit when the deduction arrives weeks later.

When you lock a monthly accrual in Confido, the booked amount is frozen — sales cannot change it. Sales can still update the underlying promotion (which changes the forecasted amount), but the booked accrual amount is a fixed point-in-time snapshot. Full version history is maintained, so you can always look back at what was booked in a prior period and how actuals compared.

Confido creates a natural accountability loop with sales teams:

What to expect during implementation and the key steps to getting Confido live.

Confido's onboarding process is structured and collaborative. The Confido team works closely with your accounting, finance, IT, and sales teams to configure the system to match your existing workflows — and improve them where possible.

Confido has supported many brands transitioning from other tools (including Vividly and other deduction management platforms). The typical migration process:

Full migrations typically take 3-4 weeks from kickoff to go-live, depending on the complexity of the data and the number of customers being onboarded.

Confido typically operates on annual contracts. For brands that want additional comfort, opt-out provisions (e.g., 60-90 day exit clauses) can be included. The platform is modular — you can start with the Accounting Automation Suite and add planning or demand planning modules over time.

Common questions from accounting teams, finance leaders, and new users.

Indefinitely, for as long as you are a customer. You can search any payment, deduction, or backup document in Confido at any time. You can also bulk-download backup by customer or date range for archiving purposes, and Confido can attach backup directly to transactions in your ERP so it is accessible there as well — particularly useful for audits.

Yes. Confido connects to your AR email inbox to process email-based remittances. For customers with no electronic remittance at all (e.g., physical checks), you can scan and drag-and-drop the document into Confido. For any customer where backup is not available at the time of posting, a clearing account workflow can be used.

Confido monitors portal changes and updates its integrations rapidly when retailers make changes (e.g., Kroger's frequent portal updates). The goal is that changes in the portal do not require action from your team and do not interrupt the flow of data into Confido.

Yes. The Accounting Automation Suite (cash application, deductions, disputes, ERP posting) is available as a standalone module. However, the greatest value is realized when the trade calendar is also in Confido, as this enables automatic promotion matching on deductions. For brands not yet using Confido's TPM module, promotion data can be imported from an existing system to enable matching.

This is a known edge case. Confido will initially classify a deduction as a shortage if it presents as one. If your team knows a credit memo already exists on the customer's account for a return, they can change the deduction type to 'credit' within Confido and select the existing credit memo to apply — rather than creating a net-new deduction line. Confido can also flag deductions where the amount closely matches an existing credit on the account, helping surface these situations proactively.

Confido supports NetSuite (as a Preferred Vendor Partner), Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, and SAP. The core cash application and deductions workflow is consistent across all ERPs; configuration details (credit memo structure, custom fields, dimensions, posting accounts) are aligned during onboarding based on your specific setup.

Yes. If the accounting period is still open, Confido can update the credit memo in the ERP to reflect the change (e.g., moving a deduction from clearing to a trade GL account, or re-tagging it to a different promotion). If the period is closed, Confido posts a journal entry to move it. All changes are made directly in Confido and synced to the ERP automatically.

When a customer repays a previously disputed deduction, the repayment is matched to the original deduction or dispute in Confido. Depending on your ERP configuration, repayments can be posted as sales invoices, journal entries, or as a positive line within an existing credit memo. Confido's disputes dashboard shows all repayments, including any that are not yet linked to an original deduction.

Confido Accounting Automation Suite — Internal Reference

For questions, contact your Confido onboarding team.