If you talk to retailers and small-to-medium distributors the choices for sales reporting in the past were to implement B2B integrations or to create dozens of custom spreadsheets each with a format specific to the manufacturer or supplier.
Retailers, distributors, manufacturers and software vendors in the AgGateway community banded together to define a standard flat file format for sales reporting. If you need to create sales data manually, the standard includes a Microsoft Excel template, User Guide, and a Specification. For those with modest IT capabilities your staff can easily implement software tooling to generate this one file format and satisfy the needs of dozens of manufacturers, suppliers and distributors.
"This is a fantastic new resource, and one that every company should consider putting into place. It's easy to set up and will save ag retailers countless hours and headaches in the months and years ahead." - ARA President and CEO Daren Coppock
"By adopting this standard, we expect to reduce manual data entry and see fewer errors in our sales reporting - resulting in labor savings, time savings and a faster turnaround on our rebates. We know many others are putting the file format in place, which will greatly improve the ease of information exchange between trading partners." - Jeff Griffeth, Innovative Business Solutions Manager, Co-Alliance
AgGateway Sales Reporting File Fact Sheet [PDF]
AgGateway Sales Reporting File Format User Guide [PDF]
AgGateway Sales Reporting File Specification [EXCEL]