You know your deduction rate. You don’t know if it’s normal.
You lose 2% of gross sales to retailer deductions. Is that a rounding error or a five-alarm fire?
You dispute 40% of chargebacks and win half of those. Is your team outperforming, or leaving money on the table?
There is no published answer. Deduction rates live in ERP systems and finance spreadsheets. Consultants quote fragments. Software vendors cite their own user base. Nobody has the distribution across the industry.
Your CFO asks whether 3% is high. Your broker says everyone deals with it. Your retailer says your rate is worse than peers. None of them show you the data, because the data doesn’t exist in any public form.
We are building it, one anonymous submission at a time.
Where do you stand?
Enter your numbers. The calculator shows what your deduction rate costs you in working capital right now, and the chart places you against every submission we’ve received. Nothing is stored or sent until you choose to submit.
Trailing 12 months. Total deductions before recoveries, divided by gross sales.
Deduction rate distribution
Your marker is the teal line. The chart fills as suppliers submit.
What we measure, precisely
A benchmark is only useful if every submission measures the same thing. Here is exactly what each field means.
| Field | Definition | What to include | What to exclude |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deduction rate | Total deductions taken on remittances in the trailing 12 months, divided by gross sales to that retailer in the same period. Before recoveries. | Shortage claims, compliance fines, OTIF penalties, pricing discrepancies, receiving adjustments, freight chargebacks | Promotional allowances, trade funds, slotting fees, co-op, volume rebates, early-pay discounts. These are negotiated costs, not operational deductions. |
| % disputed | Share of gross deduction dollars for which you filed a formal dispute or claim in the trailing 12 months. | Any deduction you formally contested through the retailer’s dispute channel (APDP, Vendor Central, etc.) | Deductions you wrote off without filing, or ones auto-resolved by the retailer before you acted. |
| Win rate | Share of disputed deduction dollars where the retailer credited you back (full or partial), as a percentage of dollars disputed. | Full reversals and partial credits on disputes you filed. | Credits that arrived without a dispute (auto-corrections), or open disputes not yet resolved. |
The line between “deduction” and “trade spending” is the hardest boundary in CPG finance. If your company tracks promotional billbacks and shortage claims in the same bucket, separate them before submitting. If you cannot separate them, do not submit. An honest gap is better than polluted data.
Why the same deduction rate hits differently at different scales
Public companies don’t break out deduction rates in their 10-Ks. But they do report the working capital environment that deductions live in, and that environment is sharply different by company size.
Working capital by revenue band, 58 public CPG companies
A wider cash cycle means each deduction point locks up more working capital. A 3% deduction rate on a 75-day cash cycle costs more to carry than 3% on a negative cycle.
| Revenue band | Companies | Median days payable | Median cash cycle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Over $10B | 14 | 105 days | -3 days |
| $1B–$10B | 32 | 50 days | 75 days |
| $500M–$1B | 5 | 43 days | 63 days |
| $100M–$500M | 6 | 30 days | 45 days |
| $10M–$50M | 1 | 37 days | 84 days |
Add your data to the census
Anonymous. No company name, no identifying details. We publish only aggregates, never individual submissions. When a segment has fewer than five submissions, we suppress it entirely.
If you leave an email, you get the full results PDF when the 2026 edition closes. That’s the only reason we ask.
How the census works
What we measure
Gross deduction rate: total operational deductions (shortage, compliance, pricing, receiving, freight) as a percentage of gross sales, before recoveries, trailing 12 months. Promotional allowances, trade funds, and negotiated rebates are excluded. See the definitions table above for the full boundary.
Both rates are self-reported. We do not audit submissions. Implausible outliers (a 40%+ deduction rate, a 100% win rate on more than token volume) are flagged and excluded from published medians.
How we protect anonymity
No company name or identifying detail is collected. Revenue is banded, not exact. We publish only aggregates: medians, percentiles, distributions and counts, never individual submissions. When a segment has fewer than five submissions, we suppress it until the count grows.
The financial context
The working-capital data (cash conversion cycles, days payable) comes from the same SEC 10-K pipeline behind The Float. Those figures cover 58 public companies and frame the cost environment. Deduction rates come only from submissions.
Who is behind this
Pixels and Clicks is a retail compliance diagnostic practice. We built The Float and the Walmart Dependency Tracker from SEC filings; the census extends that research to the one number filings don’t carry. We have no software to sell and no reason to skew the results.
When the next edition publishes
The 2026 census stays open through December 2026. We publish the first results summary at 50 submissions and the full annual report in Q1 2027. Every submitter who left an email gets it first.
Use this data
When published, the aggregate results will be free to cite with a link to this page.
More on deductions and cash flow
SEC data on 58 public CPG companies. Working capital, cash cycles, and a calculator for your own gap.
See the data →How dependent is each CPG brand on Walmart? Concentration data for 60 public companies since 2009.
Compare your concentration →What SEC 10-K data says about who funds the retail shelf, and how to measure your own gap.
Read the article →Four deduction families trace to contracts, not operations. One question tells you which is which.
Read the article →Know your rate. Now find where it comes from.
The census tells you whether your deduction rate is normal. The assessment traces each open deduction to its root cause in fourteen days, from $2,500.