Deviated pricing billbacks, drafted from your invoices for your claims analyst.

Each period, someone on your claims desk sorts the contract sales out of thousands of invoice lines. For each one they find the agreement, check that the kitchen was covered on that date, figure the per-case or per-pound gap between your cost and the deviated cost, and assemble the claim in that manufacturer's format with the sales detail attached.

In the proof of concept the same sorting happens on copies. AI drafts every billback line with the agreement, kitchen, invoice, item, cases or pounds and amount, and notes which proof is missing. The draft stays on a review sheet for your analyst.

Your receiving records can't show who a case was for. You buy a manufacturer's product in bulk for every account, so the manufacturer can't see which cases went to a contract customer. A 2006 federal court memorandum in Feesers v. Michael Foods notes that for this reason Sysco had to give Michael Foods proof of sales identifying what it sold to Sodexho (now Sodexo) accounts before invoicing the difference. So a billback is built from your sales invoices, not your receipts.

The operator has to be on the agreement that day. The same record describes three ways a kitchen buys: it runs its own food service, hands it to a management company, or stays independent and buys through a GPO whose members place their own orders and get the terms it negotiated. It named Entegra as Sodexho's GPO. A billback is owed only for locations the agreement covers, inside its dates. A hospital that joined the group late, a school that left a management contract, or a restaurant that only shares a name with a chain is a line the manufacturer can refuse. The draft checks every line against the roster or ship-to list you send.

The price math has two halves. A 2011 Court of Federal Claims opinion in a bid protest brought by U.S. Foodservice set out the trade's basic model: a delivered price, built from what your distribution center paid plus inbound freight, plus a distribution price, either a percentage markup or a fixed amount per case. A deviation swaps the agreed price in for the delivered price. So the draft checks both halves: the claim is the gap between the list cost you paid and the deviated cost on the invoice date, and the operator's invoice carried the deviated cost plus your fee. When an agreement sets the deviation per pound on a random-weight item, the claim uses the invoiced weight, not the case count.

Not every dollar from a manufacturer is a billback. The 2011 opinion lists earned income on its own: promotional allowances, cash discounts, prompt pay discounts, growth programs and freight allowances. The 2006 memorandum adds that rebates a management company negotiates are paid to it directly, not through the distributor, and that marketing allowances are rarely passed on to customers. The draft keeps deviation claims apart from all of that. Whether a billback starts from list cost or from an invoice that already carried an off-invoice allowance depends on the agreement, so it goes into the success criteria first.

Schools add a second kind of billback. When a school district's USDA Foods are processed into finished items, one approved way to pass their value through is net off invoice. Oregon's Department of Education describes it: the distributor invoices the district at the commercial price less the value of the USDA Foods in the item, reports the sale to the processor, whose tracking system draws down the district's pounds, and bills the processor back for that value. Your reviewer, usually the claims or rebate analyst, scores each draft against the claim you filed and the payment or short pay that came back.

A yes from your reviewer, judged against the success criteria, moves the same work onto new contract sales for about 30 days.

Your analyst reviews every drafted billback and alone decides what gets filed. Claims, portals and deductions stay in your team's hands.

You see the fixed price for that month before signing, and whatever follows is chosen later, on its own terms.