Dealing with bonuses and additional discounts

The easiest way to handle bonuses depending on future sales is using conservative (pessimistic) estimation of future sales, assuming that you will sell no items in the future so you can count with a discount already achieved. With this approach you have just to check if you did not reach a margin affecting threshold with the actual transaction and in that case recalculate backwardly the price of all items sold in previous periods.

For making right decisions however you often need to make a forecast of future sales and calculate estimated discount which you may need to adjust regularly.

Another challenge can be that suppliers often use different models and rules of achieving bonuses and they are always inventing new ones. These models often can be quite difficult to implement in current business intelligence systems and final prices are created manually using Excel sheets. This creates additional, and often instable data source structures that designer of  the BI system must consider.

So what is specific for the retail business intelligence systems? The basic data they use are often clean and easily accessible so with current tools it is easy to create the basic system and you often do not need BI for this. Most time and energy will be spend in designing and deploying different bonus models that will often need some programming and exception handling.

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Related posts:

1. Business Intelligence Software and Systems, an Introduction
2. Data Sources for Business Intelligence

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