Deal money is the liability your ERP does not govern

Trade deals promise money back to customers months after the invoice. Most Finance & Operations shops track that liability in a spreadsheet, and the ERP never knows what was promised.

The price on the line is not one number

In commodity and consumer-goods trade a sold price is a base, a premium over that base, and deal money the customer will claim back later. Finance & Operations stores a single unit price. The decomposition that says how much of that price is a future liability lives somewhere else, usually a spreadsheet maintained by the person who negotiated the deal, and the ERP invoices a number it cannot explain.

Where the native modules stop

Trade Allowance Management and Rebate Management are real and useful, and they model allowances off the price. They do not build deal money into the invoiced price, they accrue at invoice rather than at shipment, and they reference the agreement live, so an agreement edited in March quietly restates an order accepted in January. For a business whose trade convention is to gross deal money into the price and to recognise the liability when the goods move, the fit is a workaround from the first day.

Why a spreadsheet is the wrong place for a liability

The spreadsheet knows what was promised, but it cannot stop a deal from costing money before anyone approved it, cannot enforce a lifetime cap at the moment an accrual would breach it, and cannot tell you that an accrual was already claimed once. That last one is not hypothetical: the pattern that lets a claimed accrual quietly reset to claimable is the most common defect in home-grown deal tracking, and it pays customers twice.

Govern the object, not the spreadsheet

Treat deal money as a governed object inside the ERP. A deal is approved by workflow, with segregation of duties, before it can price anything. The price is built as base plus over-basis plus deal money and frozen when the order is accepted, so later edits never restate it. The accrual posts as a real journal when goods ship, in the deal's currency, against a cap that is enforced in the same transaction. Claims are documents with their own approval, credited to the customer and settled in standard AR, with a statement that proves the balance from the ledger itself. That is what Earmark does, on one engine that also runs the vendor side, and without touching the native modules a tenant may already be running.