The sale closes and the seller gets paid. Ninety days later the customer cancels, pays off early or lapses, and the vendor claws the money back. Most operators absorb that reversal, never pass it through, and never reconcile it against what the plan actually said. The gap doesn't show up as a line item. It shows up as a business that is quietly upside down on its own sales force.
From $4,500 · 10 business days · credited toward ongoing reconciliation
| Line item | Per your books | Reconciled | Variance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Commissions paid to sellers | — | — | — |
| Vendor chargebacks received | — | — | — |
| Chargebacks passed through | — | — | — |
| Underpayments owed to you | — | — | — |
| Reserve accrued | — | — | — |
| Unreconciled exposure | — |
This is the statement you receive, not a sample of someone else's numbers. Thriving Partners does not publish other operators' results and does not publish industry averages it cannot source. Every figure that lands in these cells traces to a document you supplied.
How the gap forms
No single stage of this is a mistake. The exposure is created by the timing, and by the fact that nobody owns the reconciliation between stage two and stage three.
A compensation schedule defines rates, tiers and qualifying conditions. Monthly incentives layer on top of it, often with their own windows and their own rules.
Commission is advanced on a transaction that has not yet survived its risk window. Everyone books it as earned, because on that day it is.
Cancellation, early payoff, lapse or non-qualification triggers a reversal — commonly on a ninety-day clock, arriving in a bulk statement long after anyone remembers the deal.
Passing it through means confronting a seller about a months-old deal, so it usually isn't done. The reversal is absorbed, the reserve is estimated rather than calculated, and the true position is unknown.
Under ASC 606, expected reversals are supposed to be estimated and reserved at the point revenue is recognized. Where reconciliation is informal, that estimate is a guess — which is a reporting problem as much as an operating one.
Before you apply
This is a small practice by design, and the work only pays for itself above a certain transaction volume. Read both columns before spending fifteen minutes on the form.
Services
Every relationship begins with a paid audit. It stands alone — if you take the findings and fix the process in-house, that is a good outcome and it will be said plainly.
Payout statements and transaction ledger matched against the compensation plan, line by line, with the clawback clock tracked per transaction rather than per statement.
Ten business days. What was paid, what was reversed, what was passed through, what the plan actually entitled you to, and what remains unreconciled — stated as a single figure with a transaction-level appendix behind it.
Where the audit shows a vendor, lender or carrier paid less than the schedule required, the claim is documented and pursued. No recovery, no fee. Audit-rights windows are often narrow, so timing is checked first.
The audit, run every close. Exceptions flagged inside the recovery window instead of a year later, a defensible reserve figure for your accountants, and per-seller net position so nobody is quietly upside down.
Margin leaks in the channel as well as the ledger. Third-party marketplace commissions commonly run 15–30% before promotions and refunds, which is a P&L problem wearing a marketing costume.
Five days. Every location scored on listing accuracy, hours, menu and price parity across marketplaces, ordering paths and review response. Delivered as a per-location scorecard.
Listings, hours, menus and pricing kept consistent across every platform and every unit, with review monitoring and a monthly variance report.
Move repeat customers off marketplace commission and onto a channel you own. Setup fee plus a share of measured first-year savings against a locked baseline.
One site, a real landing page per unit, direct ordering integrated, built to be maintained by your own people rather than rented back to you.
Once the compensation ledger is clean, the same unit-level method applies to the rest of the P&L. Offered to existing clients rather than sold cold.
One specific operating question, one written page, seventy-two hours. The cheapest way to find out whether this practice is worth more of your money.
Unit-level variance across four quarters — labor deployment, prime cost, occupancy and vendor terms — ranked by what is recoverable inside ninety days.
Full teardown of P&L, payroll, vendor agreements and lease schedule, with lease abstraction handled by a contracted commercial lease specialist.
A limited number of engagements are accepted each quarter. Pricing is fixed at scoping and does not move mid-engagement.
How it runs
The mutual NDA sits where the data does — at handoff, not at first contact. That is also the point at which the principal is named to you and the method is opened for inspection.
Fifteen minutes on the form, or a note from an accountant who already knows your books. Every application gets a reply, including a no.
Forty-five minutes, no deck. Either the audit will find something worth the fee, or you'll be told it won't — at no charge.
A two-way NDA protects your statements and the method. The document list is fixed in advance; nothing is requested that isn't used.
The exposure statement, a transaction-level appendix, and a recorded ninety-minute session. Every figure traces to a source you can check.
Who does the work
[NAME]
Digital operations lead
Professional liability cover of $[AMOUNT] carried with [CARRIER]. Certificate provided on request before any engagement letter is signed.
Client records held in an access-controlled workspace, used only for the engagement that produced them, shared only with a specialist you have approved, and destroyed or returned on completion at your instruction.
No referral fees are paid or received, in either direction, from any vendor, lender, carrier or platform. Fee income comes from clients only, so the findings answer to nobody else.
Application
A limited number are accepted each quarter, reviewed weekly. Every applicant gets a reply within five business days — including a plain no, with the reason.
Everything submitted is held in confidence and never shared. No mailing list. No contact details sold or passed on.
Reasonable objections
Accounting records what was paid and what was reversed. Reconciliation asks a different question: whether the amount paid matched what the plan entitled you to, transaction by transaction, and whether each reversal was tracked back to the deal that caused it. Those are rarely the same exercise, and the gap between them is where this practice works.
Free assessments attract people who want a free assessment. A real fee funds ten days of transaction-level work rather than a sales call dressed as an audit, and it filters for operators who intend to act on the answer. It is credited toward ongoing reconciliation.
Then that is what the report says. Deductions from earned commissions are regulated differently in different states, and an unreconciled ledger can carry employment exposure as well as accounting exposure. This practice does not provide legal advice — it produces the record. Finding it yourself is materially better than a plaintiff's attorney finding it for you, and you'll be pointed toward counsel who can advise on what to do next.
Because they're checkable. Every figure traces to a document you supplied, and the method is set out on this page before you pay anything. Other operators' numbers are not published here — the ones worth citing are precisely the ones who would not want to be. References are provided on the scoping call.
The compensation plan and any incentive schedules, vendor or carrier payout statements for the period under review, and a transaction ledger that can be matched to them. Plus forty-five minutes each from whoever owns sales compensation and whoever closes the books. If the ledger and the statements can't be matched, that is itself a finding and it changes the scope.
No. Anyone guaranteeing a number on records they haven't seen is selling something. The commitment is a written, sourced statement of the position. If the audit finds less than it cost, that is what the report will say.