AgGateway & ARA Offer Standardized Sales Reporting

If your job includes sales reporting, perhaps that job just got a little easier. AgGateway and the Agricultural Retailers Association (ARA) have collaborated to design a standard file format for sales reporting to manufacturers and suppliers. The new format is simple to use and has been generally accepted in the industry.

This standard was created through AgGateways’ collaborative process as part of their recently expanded eBusiness program. It is freely available for those who’d like to use it.

The two companies are hosing a one-hour training webinar to share more about the format. The webinar will be held on February 25 from 3:00-4:00 EDT and repeated March 2 from 11:00-noon EDT. The webinar will include a Q&A opportunity. A user guide, fact sheet and other useful information can be found at www.AgGateway.org under “eConnectivity Tools”.

“This is a fantastic new resource, and one that every company should consider putting into place,” said ARA President and CEO Daren Coppock. “It’s easy to set up and will save ag retailers countless hours and headaches in the months and years ahead.”

“By adopting this standard, we expect to reduce manual data entry and see fewer errors in our sales reporting – resulting in labor savings, time savings and a faster turnaround on our rebates,” said Jeff Griffeth, Innovative Business Solutions Manager, Co-Alliance, and Chair of AgGateway’s Ag Retail Council. “We know many others are putting the file format in place, which will greatly improve the ease of information exchange between trading partners.”

The new file format addresses a pervasive problem when it comes to sales reporting: Retailers and small-to-medium-sized distributors who weren’t in a position to implement B2B integrations had to create dozens of custom spreadsheets, each with a format specific to the manufacturer or supplier. To fix this problem, major retailers, distributors, manufacturers and software vendors in the AgGateway community banded together to define a standard file format for sales reporting. The new file format supports the use of standard industry identifiers such as GLNs, GTINs, and Units of Measure; these identifiers are now accessible to the public through AgGateway’s Ag Industry Identification System (AGIIS). The file format can be created manually using Microsoft Excel templates or, with modest IT capabilities, a company can generate it programmatically. Most importantly, this one file format will satisfy the needs of dozens of manufacturers, suppliers and distributors.

By supporting this standard format, manufacturers and suppliers will also benefit from greater adoption and faster implementations. For software providers it means fewer formats to support and less implementation work for sales reporting integrations.