Direct Expenses are those that the dealer incurs exclusively for the company
concerned.
And Indirect Expenses are those that the dealer incurs in totality for the companies
for whom the resource/s is/are being shared.
The only rule in calculating expenses is that you need to take into account the part of
expenses that he is incurring for your company alone. We will see how we do it
below.
2. Similarly the second trick lies in properly calculating the denominator, i.e Net
Investment.
A dealer’s investment comprises of 3 parts : Average Stock that lies in his godown,
Average Market Credit that he extends & Average Claims Outstanding,
Hence,
Investment = Avg Closing Stock + Avg Market Credit + Avg. Claims Outstanding
Here the usual suspect where one may go wrong in calculating Investment is the first
variable i.e. Average Closing Stock of the dealer.
A layman would take the month-end closing stock as the average closing stock for
the dealer, or worse if you do the mistake of asking the dealer what his closing stock
is, the beast would tell you a figure which will be his all time high closing stock in a
month.
The typical trend in FMCG is that majority of Pushing, also known colloquially as
“thokna” (Primary) and Pulling (Secondary) happens in the last week and therefore
the last week is not a true indicator of the entire month’s activity then why consider
last week’s closing stock as his month’s closing stock. (To clarify, primary is what
your company bills to the dealer and secondary is what your dealer bills to the
retailer)
Confused?, we will deal with it with simplicity. Consider this as the trend of Primary &
Secondary for a dealer in a 4-week cycle of a month
WEEK OPENING
STOCK
PRIMARY SECONDARY CLOSING
STOCK
1 5, 00,000 50,000 1,00,000 4,50,000
2 4,50,000 1,00,000 2,00,000 3,50,000
3 3,50,000 2,50,000 2,50,000 3,50,000
4 3,50,000 5,50,000 4,00,000 5,00,000
The above table is how a dealer’s inventory in a typical FMCG set-up would behave
like, i.e. majority of activity happening in the last week and hence one would be
wrong in taking 5,00,000 (Week-4 Closing Stock) as the average closing stock for
that dealer in that month.
The better way to do it is to take an average of all 4 weeks’ closing stocks. In this
case it would come out to be as : ( 4,50,000 + 3,50,000 + 3,50,000 + 5,00,000) / 4