# Schemes were paying for volume that was coming anyway. — Radexus > Dealer incentives had never been tested against counterfactual volume, and claims were reconciled by hand at quarter end by two people who had done it that way for years. *Source: https://radexus.com/cases/scheme-volume/* --- [Success stories](https://radexus.com/cases/)  /  Building products # Schemes were paying for volume that was coming anyway. - Sector: **Building products** - Scale: **South India, INR 900 Cr revenue** - Duration: **2 quarters to result** - Number agreed: **Scheme payout** In this success story - [The disagreement that had to be settled first](#h-0) - [What the memory found](#h-1) - [The result](#h-2) Dealer incentives had never been tested against counterfactual volume, and claims were reconciled by hand at quarter end by two people who had done it that way for years. The company makes building products sold through a dealer network across four southern states. Dealer schemes, running as slabs and quarterly rebates, cost a meaningful share of gross margin and had been in place, largely unchanged in structure, for eleven years. Nobody could say what they bought. Not because anyone was careless, but because the counterfactual was never computed: what volume would this dealer have done anyway, and what did the scheme add on top of that? ## The disagreement that had to be settled first Finance defined scheme cost as accrued payout. Sales defined it as paid claims, which lag by a quarter and net off disputes. The two figures differed by enough to change the answer, and both appeared in different reports to the same board. The definition the CFO signed measured **payout per scheme-attributable tonne**, with attributable volume defined as the increment above a dealer's own trailing four-quarter baseline, seasonally adjusted, excluding project-linked volume that was won centrally and merely billed through the dealer. That last exclusion was the contentious one, and it took two meetings. It was also worth more than anything else in the model. ## What the memory found - A cohort of dealers were being paid slab incentives on volume that was entirely project-linked and centrally won. The scheme was rewarding invoicing, not selling. - Two territories had scheme structures that had drifted through years of local negotiation into something no one at head office could reconstruct. They were being administered from memory by one regional manager. - Claims reconciliation was absorbing roughly forty person-days a quarter, and the error rate in the manual process was material in the company's favour, which is its own kind of problem when a dealer eventually checks. **The eval gate earned its keep**The first attributable-volume model was wrong in one region, where a genuine market expansion looked like scheme-driven growth. It scored below its gate and did not promote. Had it shipped, the company would have cut incentives in its fastest-growing territory on our advice. ## The result Scheme payout per attributable tonne fell eighteen percent over two quarters at flat total volume, with the reduction concentrated in the structures that the model showed were buying nothing. Two dealers were moved to a different structure entirely rather than cut, which the sales team proposed and the model supported. The reconciliation work went from forty person-days a quarter to about six, and the residual six are spent on genuine disputes rather than arithmetic. **Scheme payout**Number agreed, per attributable tonne **18% lower**Result at 2 quarters, at flat volume **31%**Second play cost, of the first, same memory **Is this your business?** The first meeting takes an hour, costs nothing, and runs a play live on four customers you name. [Start a discovery](https://radexus.com/start/) [Back ### All success stories ](https://radexus.com/cases/)[Next ### They had sold the instruments and stopped earning from them. ](https://radexus.com/cases/installed-base/)