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You can analyze your trade spend and improve profitability using the Chargebacks dashboard. This dashboard pulls information directly from UNFI and reveals trade spend insights that help you understand how your chargeback dollars relate to your sales.

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What is a chargeback?

In UNFI Insights, a chargeback refers to trade spend — the promotional dollars that UNFI deducts from your sales to fund retailer promotions, ad deals, demos, and similar programs. Chargebacks are categorized by code (for example, A, C, D, P, T). For the full list of codes and what they mean, see UNFI chargeback codes.

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Chargebacks vs. deductions

Chargebacks and deductions are related but tracked on different dashboards:
  • Chargebacks are promotional trade spend (for example, case stack deals, EDLP, ad deals, demos). Analyze them on this dashboard.
  • Deductions are amounts posted against your UNFI account that reduce your open payables balance. Deductions can include chargebacks as well as non-promotional charges such as fees and adjustments. Review them on the Open Payables dashboard. See Reviewing open UNFI invoices.
If your open payables balance is negative, the deductions amount on your account exceeds the invoices UNFI has posted. To research the source of a specific deduction, use the Invoice Number column on the Open Payables dashboard and refer to the UNFI supplier support site Supplier Deduction Key. The following sections describe each visualization in the dashboard.

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Chargebacks Over Time

The vertical bars in this chart compare your total sales in dollars (green) with your total chargebacks in dollars (pink). The chargeback percentage of your sales (purple) overlays these bars, helping you determine whether your spend has had a positive effect on sales.

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Total Sales Dollars, Chargeback Dollars, Chargeback % of Sales

These three tiles show the total sales in dollars, total chargebacks in dollars, and total chargeback percentage of sales. By filtering for seasonal periods or times of heavy promotion, you can better identify how much lift is driven by spend.

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Chargebacks by Chain

This sortable table displays chargeback dollars by retailer, helping you answer the question: “How efficient is that retailer at giving me a return on my investment?”

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Chargebacks by Code

This chart breaks down the types of chargebacks that appear in the dashboard. Hover over each slice for more information. Note: Selecting a slice to filter by chargeback code will result in $0 sales, since sales figures can’t be attributed to a given chargeback code without duplication.

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Chargebacks % of Sales by State

This map shows which areas of the country could be more efficient to spend your money in, based on the chargeback percentage of your sales.

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Chargebacks by Product

This table helps you identify products that are performing well and could be worth investing in for promotions. Filter by a specific retailer to see how efficient your spend is with them. Select column headers to sort by ascending or descending value.

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Chargebacks by DC

This sortable table provides another view of spend, broken down by distribution center.

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Chargebacks Detail

The Chargebacks Detail table displays store-level details and invoice numbers along with chargeback dollars. Hover over the right corner of the table and select the three-dot menu to download. If you have any questions or experience issues, please reach out to UNFIinsights@unfi.com.