Guides Checklist
Rebate contract intake checklist: what to capture from every supplier agreement
A printable checklist of the fields to pull from a supplier rebate agreement at signature, renewal or amendment, so the rebate can be calculated, claimed and defended later.
Version 1.1, last reviewed September 19, 2026
Printed with nothing answered, it is a blank form to work through on paper.
Answer for your hospital, not for us. Mark each item Yes, Partly or No, and note the reference where you have it. A yes with no reference noted counts as partly. Your answers are kept in this browser and nothing is sent to us.
Go to your tally and what to work on
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Run this checklist for every agreement at signature, renewal and amendment, before the first measurement period under the new terms closes. The contract manager fills it in, supply chain finance reviews it, and someone who knows the purchase data should be in the room, because many of these answers decide which transactions count. Write the page and section number beside every answer, and “agreement is silent” where it is. A yes with neither counts as partly. The aim is a record you and the supplier would both recognize as the deal you signed.
Before you start
Measure your baseline first
- Baseline taken on three recently signed agreements before anything changes: how many of the answers below you can give today with a page reference, and whether someone outside contracting can recalculate the last closed period by hand.
Reading the agreement
Documents and parties
- Supplier legal entity, parent company and contract number, copied from the signature page.
- Agreement type: GPO, local, or distributor agreement. It usually decides who calculates and who pays.
- Base agreement, every amendment and every exhibit in one file, each with its effective date and the order of precedence.
- Amendments logged against the existing deal. Recording one as a second contract counts the same purchases twice.
- Every company that invoices you for these products, and its role: contracting supplier or authorized distributor.
Dates and periods
- Effective and expiry dates. If a renewal never updates the recorded end date, tracking stops with no error to warn you.
- Agreement year: calendar year, supplier fiscal year, or twelve months from the effective date.
- Measurement period (monthly, quarterly, annual) and whether periods follow the calendar or the anniversary.
- Any short first or last period, and whether targets are prorated for it.
- Grace days for late transactions, and days after period end that payment is due.
- Auto-renewal terms and the last date to give notice.
Who is covered
- Covered facilities, listed by name and by the identifier your purchase data uses (ship-to, entity or cost center).
- Class of trade limits: acute, ambulatory, physician practice, retail pharmacy.
- Measurement level: all facilities added together, or each facility against its own target.
- The rule for facilities acquired or divested mid-term, including any notice needed to add one.
What counts as a purchase
- Eligible products, by catalog number list or category definition, and the exhibit that holds them.
- Exclusions, and the rule for new products and new-technology items.
- Purchase channel: direct, through a distributor, or both. If distributor purchases count, note who supplies the sales tracing data.
- Treatment of bill-only, consigned and no-charge items.
- Definition of net purchases: whether credits, returns, freight, taxes and fees are in or out.
- The date that places a purchase in a period: order, invoice, ship or receipt date.
- Unit of measure for any unit-based term (each, box or case), with a conversion for every product.
The measure and the ladder
- What each rebate program measures: dollars, units, growth over a baseline, or market share.
- Every tier threshold and rate, copied exactly, including whether the top tier has a ceiling.
- Tier application: the rate of the tier reached on all purchases (retrospective) or each rate on its own slice (stepped).
- When the tier is decided: per period, per transaction or year to date, and whether a year-end true-up applies.
- Guaranteed minimums, caps per period or per year, and targets that step up each year.
- Growth terms: baseline period, baseline amount, and whether the rate pays on the growth or on the whole period.
- Share terms: numerator, denominator, the products that define the market, and the data source both sides accept.
Five answers tend to move the payout most. The figures below are illustrative.
| Field | Why it matters | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Tier application | With 1% below $250,000 and 2% from there up, a $400,000 quarter pays $8,000 retrospective or $5,500 stepped | The usual reading is assumed and the clause is never checked |
| Purchase record measured | Only transactions in that record count | Product ships through a distributor, so direct invoices show almost nothing |
| Unit basis | Unit ladders compare counts, not dollars | A box of 20 is counted as one unit and the threshold is never reached |
| Share denominator | It defines the market total your purchases are divided by | No competing products are listed, so share reads 100% every period |
| Period layout | It decides which period each purchase lands in | Quarters are counted from the effective date when the agreement says calendar quarters |
Conditions of payment
- Each commitment that gates a rebate (spend, volume, share or signed attestation) and the rebate it gates.
- The commitment’s clock against the rebate’s clock. An annual commitment can gate a quarterly rebate.
- Letters of commitment, tier-activation forms and compliance forms: due date, recipient, and the date the rebate is forfeited if the form is missing.
- Alternative ways to qualify, such as “any two of three” or a unit target in place of a dollar target.
- Anything else that voids the rebate: invoice payment terms, credit standing, supplier discretion language.
Payment, verification and disputes
- Who calculates the rebate: supplier, distributor, GPO or you.
- Payment form (check, electronic payment, credit memo, free goods) and due date.
- Remittance detail the supplier must send: period, program, purchase base and rate.
- Whether GPO or distributor administrative fees are separate from this rebate.
- Supplier reporting duties, your audit rights, the dispute window, and the lookback limit on claims.
- The agreed source of truth when the two calculations differ.
Downside terms
- Price reversion or tier downgrade after a missed commitment.
- Clawback, conversion payment or repayment of upfront money if volume moves to another supplier.
- What happens to earned but unpaid rebates on early termination.
Setting it up
Finance and compliance setup
The anti-kickback statute’s discount safe harbor (42 CFR 1001.952(h)) defines a rebate as a discount whose terms are fixed and disclosed in writing to the buyer at the time of the initial purchase. To stay within it, a buyer that files cost reports must, among other conditions, earn the discount on purchases of the same good or service within a single fiscal year, claim it in that year or the next, and report it fully and accurately in the cost report. Medicare cost principles (42 CFR 413.98) treat discounts, allowances and refunds as reductions of the cost of what was bought, not as income. This is a summary, not legal, reimbursement or accounting advice: ask compliance, counsel and your reimbursement team how both rules apply to each agreement.
- Accrual trigger agreed with finance, and the method for estimating tiers not yet reached.
- GL account, and the rule for allocating the rebate to facilities and cost centers.
- Cost report support file opened: agreement, calculation method, amounts and supplier statements.
- Compliance review done: terms fixed and disclosed in writing by the first purchase, fiscal-year timing understood.
Ownership and calendar
- A named owner and a backup.
- One calendar holding period ends, form deadlines, payment due dates and the renewal notice date.
- A distance-to-next-tier threshold that triggers a review while the period is still open.
- The date of the next full review. Any amendment restarts this checklist.
What good looks like
- Every answer carries a page reference, and a second person has read the summary back against the agreement.
- Someone outside contracting can recalculate the first closed period by hand from this checklist and the purchase data, and gets the same figure.
- No compliance form or attestation is filed late during the agreement year.
- Every period has a payment due date on the calendar, and every payment is matched to its period within 30 days of receipt.
- An amendment reaches the record within ten business days of signature, and figures for periods already settled change only where the amendment says so.
Start with the agreements that have a period end or renewal notice date in the next 90 days, and run this checklist on those first.
Your tally
Your answers
You have answered 0 of 52 items.
As the checklist says, a yes with no reference noted is counted as partly.
| Section | Yes | Partly | No | Not answered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before you start | ||||
| Measure your baseline first | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Reading the agreement | ||||
| Documents and parties | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 |
| Dates and periods | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| Who is covered | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| What counts as a purchase | 0 | 0 | 0 | 7 |
| The measure and the ladder | 0 | 0 | 0 | 7 |
| Conditions of payment | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 |
| Payment, verification and disputes | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| Downside terms | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Setting it up | ||||
| Finance and compliance setup | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| Ownership and calendar | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| All items | 0 | 0 | 0 | 52 |
What to work on
Nothing yet. Each item you answer No or Partly is listed here, with what addresses it.
Gaps Rebate Recovery addresses
Each note names what the product does and where your team still decides.
Supplier legal entity, parent company and contract number, copied from the signature page.
The contract assistant reads the signed PDF into a draft and marks each value as found word for word on a cited page, a close match, or not found. A person confirms before anything is created.
The contract assistant: released to administrators first.
How Rebate Recovery handles thisRead why every value needs its source
Agreement type: GPO, local, or distributor agreement. It usually decides who calculates and who pays.
Each contract carries its source, and received rebate is reported by GPO, local and distributor agreement.
How Rebate Recovery handles thisRead who calculates and what you can check
Base agreement, every amendment and every exhibit in one file, each with its effective date and the order of precedence.
Contract documents store the agreement, amendments and exhibits with effective dates, and an analysis grades each provision against the current set-up, with page references.
Contract documents: released to administrators first.
Amendments logged against the existing deal. Recording one as a second contract counts the same purchases twice.
The AI loader turns an amendment away rather than importing it as a second contract, and contract documents file the amendment with the agreement it changes.
Contract documents: released to administrators first.
Every company that invoices you for these products, and its role: contracting supplier or authorized distributor.
The contract wizard records each company as a party or an authorized distributor, so a distributor’s invoices count as the supplier’s volume, not a competitor’s.
Effective and expiry dates. If a renewal never updates the recorded end date, tracking stops with no error to warn you.
Contracts within 60 days of expiry are listed in their own Control Tower lane, so a renewal that was never entered shows up before tracking stops.
Control Tower: released to administrators first.
Agreement year: calendar year, supplier fiscal year, or twelve months from the effective date.
Pay periods are generated from the contract’s dates and frequency. Fiscal calendars are calendar-year today, so an agreement year that follows a supplier’s fiscal year is worth raising with us.
Measurement period (monthly, quarterly, annual) and whether periods follow the calendar or the anniversary.
The contract’s frequency sets its pay periods, each with its grace days and calculation date.
Any short first or last period, and whether targets are prorated for it.
Targets can be pro-rated by day for a partial period.
Grace days for late transactions, and days after period end that payment is due.
Each pay period carries its grace days and payment timing, and a payment past due raises an overdue alert.
Covered facilities, listed by name and by the identifier your purchase data uses (ship-to, entity or cost center).
Facility scope is set on each rule. A facility name that matches no hospital record is kept as written, pays $0 and raises an alert, rather than being guessed.
How Rebate Recovery handles thisRead how a facility scope resolves to nothing
Class of trade limits: acute, ambulatory, physician practice, retail pharmacy.
Scope rules limit a rebate to named facilities or hospitals, so a class-of-trade limit is held as the list of facilities it covers.
Measurement level: all facilities added together, or each facility against its own target.
Per-facility ladders that do not aggregate, and per-facility true-ups, are modelled as written.
Eligible products, by catalog number list or category definition, and the exhibit that holds them.
Product scope can be a catalog list, imported in bulk or kept in step with the item master, or defined by spend category or product tag.
Purchase channel: direct, through a distributor, or both. If distributor purchases count, note who supplies the sales tracing data.
Distributor sales tracing loads as its own file type, and a rebate can be set to read it instead of direct invoices.
The date that places a purchase in a period: order, invoice, ship or receipt date.
Each rebate is set to read the purchase record the agreement names, such as invoices, purchase orders or receipts.
How Rebate Recovery handles thisRead what happens when a rebate reads the wrong record
Unit of measure for any unit-based term (each, box or case), with a conversion for every product.
Pack-invoiced products are counted in eaches on unit-based terms, and a missing conversion raises an alert.
What each rebate program measures: dollars, units, growth over a baseline, or market share.
Spend, volume, growth over a baseline and market share programs are all modelled, and each term reads itself back in plain English.
Every tier threshold and rate, copied exactly, including whether the top tier has a ceiling.
Tiers and rates are entered per program, and a cap can be a dollar amount or a percentage of purchases.
Tier application: the rate of the tier reached on all purchases (retrospective) or each rate on its own slice (stepped).
Retrospective and stepped tiers are both modelled, and the plain-English read-back says which one a term uses.
How Rebate Recovery handles thisRead how to tell retrospective from stepped
When the tier is decided: per period, per transaction or year to date, and whether a year-end true-up applies.
Per-period and per-transaction calculation, cumulative year-to-date tiers and annual true-ups are all modelled.
Guaranteed minimums, caps per period or per year, and targets that step up each year.
Floors and caps are rules on the program, and tiers and commitments that step up by agreement year are modelled.
Growth terms: baseline period, baseline amount, and whether the rate pays on the growth or on the whole period.
Growth rebates take a prior-year, prior-period or fixed baseline, and pay on the growth only or on the whole period.
Share terms: numerator, denominator, the products that define the market, and the data source both sides accept.
Each share commitment states its own market, and the same definition is applied to both sides of the fraction. Alerts fire when the market is empty or far too wide.
How Rebate Recovery handles thisRead ten clauses to get in writing
Each commitment that gates a rebate (spend, volume, share or signed attestation) and the rebate it gates.
Qualification rules gate a rebate on one or more commitments, and an unmet or unattested commitment keeps the gated rebate from being counted, with the reason written down.
How Rebate Recovery handles thisRead how a gating commitment empties a rebate
The commitment’s clock against the rebate’s clock. An annual commitment can gate a quarterly rebate.
A commitment can have its own measurement window, so an annual commitment can gate a quarterly rebate, with the quarters re-booked when the annual result lands.
Letters of commitment, tier-activation forms and compliance forms: due date, recipient, and the date the rebate is forfeited if the form is missing.
Compliance-form deadlines are tracked, with alerts as the due and forfeiture dates approach.
Alternative ways to qualify, such as “any two of three” or a unit target in place of a dollar target.
‘Any two of three’ and either-or targets are modelled as qualification rules.
Anything else that voids the rebate: invoice payment terms, credit standing, supplier discretion language.
Judgments such as good standing are recorded as attestations, with who signed, when and the paper behind them. Until one is recorded, the rebate that depends on it is not counted.
Who calculates the rebate: supplier, distributor, GPO or you.
The engine calculates every rebate from your own purchases, so you have your own figure whoever pays.
Payment form (check, electronic payment, credit memo, free goods) and due date.
Payment type is part of the contract set-up, and each pay period carries its payment timing.
Whether GPO or distributor administrative fees are separate from this rebate.
GPO and distributor admin fees are accrued from your own purchases and checked against the statement you are sent.
How Rebate Recovery handles thisRead how GPO administrative fees work
The agreed source of truth when the two calculations differ.
The interpretation review sets out each rule as the contract words it, with the quoted sentence and page, how it was read and the money it produced, for the supplier to confirm or dispute.
The interpretation review: released to administrators first.
Price reversion or tier downgrade after a missed commitment.
Price tiers tied to a commitment are modelled, and an alert fires when invoices were billed at a higher price tier than a met commitment entitles you to.
Clawback, conversion payment or repayment of upfront money if volume moves to another supplier.
Conversion-payment exposure is priced as downside on the commitment, with its own alert. Other clawback terms are read and recorded by a person.
GL account, and the rule for allocating the rebate to facilities and cost centers.
Earned, received and pending report by cost center and hospital, which gives finance its allocation basis. The account mapping lives in your ledger.
One calendar holding period ends, form deadlines, payment due dates and the renewal notice date.
Pay periods, compliance-form deadlines and payment timing are held on each contract, with alerts as form deadlines approach and when a payment is overdue. The renewal notice date belongs on your own calendar.
A distance-to-next-tier threshold that triggers a review while the period is still open.
A ‘next tier within reach’ alert flags an open period within 10% of its next tier, by default, with the purchasing still needed to reach it.
How Rebate Recovery handles thisRead how to price the next dollar
Gaps that are policy or process
Software does not fix these. Each needs a decision, an owner or a routine. Where a product check sits next to one, the note says so.
Baseline taken on three recently signed agreements before anything changes: how many of the answers below you can give today with a page reference, and whether someone outside contracting can recalculate the last closed period by hand.
Your own measurement. It shows how much of each deal lives only in someone’s memory, and it is what your business case is compared with.
Auto-renewal terms and the last date to give notice.
The notice date usually falls well before expiry, so it belongs on your contract calendar with an owner.
The rule for facilities acquired or divested mid-term, including any notice needed to add one.
A contract and notice decision. Once it is made, facility scope and effective-date windows hold it.
Exclusions, and the rule for new products and new-technology items.
A reading decision to agree with the supplier. Once agreed, exclusions are held in the product scope.
Treatment of bill-only, consigned and no-charge items.
A reading of the agreement. The calculation counts what the purchase record it reads contains, so decide where these items appear in your data.
Definition of net purchases: whether credits, returns, freight, taxes and fees are in or out.
A definition to settle with the supplier in writing before the first period closes.
Remittance detail the supplier must send: period, program, purchase base and rate.
A clause to get in writing. When remittances arrive, payments are allocated to the periods and programs they settle.
Supplier reporting duties, your audit rights, the dispute window, and the lookback limit on claims.
Contract terms to record and put on the calendar with an owner.
What happens to earned but unpaid rebates on early termination.
A term to read, record and agree with the supplier before termination is on the table.
Accrual trigger agreed with finance, and the method for estimating tiers not yet reached.
An accounting policy for finance and your auditors. Earned and pending by contract are the inputs.
Cost report support file opened: agreement, calculation method, amounts and supplier statements.
A filing routine for reimbursement. Report exports can feed it, but the file is yours.
Compliance review done: terms fixed and disclosed in writing by the first purchase, fiscal-year timing understood.
A legal and compliance review. Software does not give this advice.
A named owner and a backup.
An ownership decision.
The date of the next full review. Any amendment restarts this checklist.
A calendar entry with an owner.
Want a second opinion on the gaps? Talk it through with us. Your answers stay on this page either way.
Where this is built in
Rebate Recovery builds many of these checks into the everyday work instead of a yearly audit. Checks every supplier rebate contract against what you actually bought, then shows what suppliers owe you today, what this period is on pace to pay, and what is still within reach before it closes.
What changed in version 1.1
- Grouped into phases, added a baseline step, stated that a yes needs a page reference, and made every item answerable on this page.