Depletion reports for every supplier, drafted from your own sales and inventory.

Today someone on your team pulls the month's invoice lines and inventory for one supplier's items, swaps your item numbers for the supplier's codes, sorts each retail account into the supplier's channel and chain groups, rolls inventory forward from the opening count, and pastes the result into the template that supplier asked for. Then they start again for the next supplier, in a different layout.

For the test, AI reads copies of the same exports and drafts each report in that supplier's own layout: items in its codes, quantities in its units, accounts in its groups, and opening and closing inventory that balance. Anything it can't place, such as an item with no supplier code, an account with no channel or a chain it doesn't recognize, goes on a list with the invoice lines behind it. The draft goes to your team, never to the supplier.

The supplier plans from your sales, not its own. A publicly traded distiller's annual report on Form 10-K says it generally records revenue when it ships to its customers, yet counts depletions as shipments from its distributor customers to retailers and wholesalers, because they reflect consumer demand more closely. It also says it uses depletion information its distributors provide to estimate how changes in distributor inventory affect its results. So your closing inventory is read as closely as your sales, and a count that doesn't follow from the opening balance, receipts, returns and depletions is the first thing a supplier questions. The draft rolls each item forward and shows the arithmetic, and keeps a sale to another wholesaler on its own line so the supplier can count it the way it asks.

Every company names products and outlets its own way. The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America describes the depletion data its members pool as built from single-product transactions between wholesalers and retailers, with each participant's own product and outlet naming, numbering and classification converted into one shared set. It reports volume in 9-liter case equivalents and standardizes accounts by premise type, with restaurants and bars on the on-premise side. One supplier's report is the same problem in miniature: your item numbers to its codes, your account types to its channels, your chains to its chain list. The draft maps from the cross-references you send and lists every item, account or chain it can't place instead of guessing.

Beer and spirits don't share a unit. Both sources above count wine and spirits in 9-liter cases, while 27 CFR 25.11 defines a barrel of beer, as a unit of measure, as 31 U.S. gallons. A case of twelve 750 ml bottles is exactly one 9-liter case; a case of six 1.75-liter bottles is more than one, and a mixed pack has to be broken out before it converts at all. The draft converts each pack size with the factor in your item file or the one the supplier names, and lists any pack size it has no factor for rather than inventing one.

The same invoices answer to the state. In Texas, 16 TAC 41.31 has wholesalers and distributors file a monthly report by the 15th of the following month, even in a month with no sales or shipments. On request, every entry must be backed by invoices showing brand, type, number and size of containers, total cases, gallons by taxable class, and the customer's trade name and shipping address. Those are the lines a depletion report is built from. Where you send a copy of the month's state report, the draft checks that each supplier's totals trace back to it and lists the months where they don't.

Corrections move numbers after the month closes. New York's State Liquor Authority tells liquor and wine wholesalers that an error in a sale or delivery to a retailer may be corrected without notice only within fourteen days of delivery and within the same calendar month, by conforming to the order as the retailer placed it. Between fourteen and thirty days the wholesaler must ask permission by email, and no return is accepted after 30 days. A correction can therefore post after the report for that month has gone out. The draft keeps returns and credits on their own lines, dated as your system dated them, and shows which month's report each one lands in. Your reviewer, usually the reporting lead or sales analyst who sends these reports, checks codes, units, account groups, the inventory roll-forward and every line on the unmapped list.

With a yes against the success criteria, the same job drafts the depletion reports that fall due over the next 30 days or so.

Someone on your team checks every draft, clears the unmapped list and sends the report to the supplier, or holds it back. Adding a code to a cross-reference stays your team's change to make.

Another job would be a separate decision, with its own price.