When I walk into a manufacturing organization and start asking about chargebacks, I usually get the same reaction.
Everyone knows they’re complicated.
Everyone knows they’re time-consuming.
Very few people see them as a material business risk.
Chargebacks tend to live in the back office. They’re handled by capable contract and finance teams who are doing their best with complex rules, tight timelines, and systems that were never really designed for this level of detail. Because of that, the conversation often stays tactical: cycle times, headcount, backlog, disputes.
What gets missed is the strategic layer.
Chargebacks are financial transactions governed by contract logic, pricing rules, and eligibility conditions. When that logic isn’t consistently defined, enforced, and automated, you don’t just create inefficiency. You create risk. Quiet, compounding, hard-to-see risk that shows up in margin erosion, distorted reporting, and strained distributor relationships.
In manufacturing, complexity is the norm:
Individually, none of these are unusual. Together, they create a perfect environment for small interpretation errors to scale.
A penny per unit.
A misapplied tier.
An expired contract that still gets honored.
A customer buying outside of commitment levels but receiving the same discount.
Across thousands of claims, those “small” issues snowball.
We recently worked with a $500M medical manufacturer that had strong people and a modern ERP. On the surface, things looked under control. But when we audited a subset of their chargeback data, the results were eye-opening:
This wasn’t a failure of effort. It was a failure of visibility and system-level control. And this was only a slice of their total volume. The true exposure was likely multiples of that.
Chargeback risk hides in the gaps between functions.
No one is doing anything wrong. The issue is that no one owns the end-to-end picture.
Because the impact is distributed and the errors are incremental, chargebacks rarely make it onto the executive risk register alongside cybersecurity, supply chain, or regulatory exposure. Until an audit, a major dispute, or a missed earnings target forces the conversation.
When manufacturers step back and look at chargebacks as a governed financial process rather than an administrative workflow, the opportunity becomes clear.
Simplification and automation create:
In other words, predictability.
And in today’s environment, predictability is one of the most valuable assets a leadership team can have.
The most practical first step is simple: establish the facts.
A structured chargeback audit gives leaders a clear view of:
From there, the path forward usually becomes obvious: targeted fixes first, then a roadmap toward integrated, automated chargeback management that treats contract logic, eligibility, and pricing governance as core financial controls, not after-the-fact cleanup.
When chargeback accuracy becomes something the leadership team tracks, not just the operations team, the conversation shifts. It’s no longer about pushing paper faster. It’s about protecting profit, strengthening partner trust, and reducing one of the few business risks manufacturers actually have the power to control.
If this is an area you’re starting to question, let’s talk about what chargeback risk and margin leakage might look like in your environment and where it’s worth getting clearer.
A simple place to start is getting an objective view of how your chargeback process is really performing and where risk may be hiding.