Ops & Supply

How to plan trade spend and retail promotions as DTC Brand Founders

Ops & SupplyFor DTC Brand Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're spending 15–25% of gross revenue on trade promotions — FSIs, scan-backs, off-invoice allowances, display fees — and your only record of it is a Google Sheet your sales rep updates when they remember. You find out a promotion underperformed when the deduction hits your bank account three weeks later. Shopify shows you DTC revenue, but retail sell-through lives in a distributor portal you log into manually every Tuesday. Your promo calendar is a separate doc. Your trade spend budget is a third spreadsheet. None of them talk to each other, and you're walking into buyer reviews at Whole Foods or Sprouts with numbers that are already stale.

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Ops & SupplyFor DTC Brand Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live trade spend tracker that maps every promotion — by account, by SKU, by event — to actual sales lift, so you know within days whether a display fee was worth it

A retail analytics dashboard pulling POS sell-through by store and region, so you spot distribution voids and velocity gaps before your buyer does

An automated promo calendar that reconciles planned trade spend against actual deductions from your bank transactions, flagging plan-to-actual variance every week

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Trade Spend Tracker Retail Analytics

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid bank transactions on a schedule so deductions post automatically against your promo budget. Connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live to pull order and revenue data for lift calculations. POS and distributor portal data is pulled through browser automation — no API needed for retailer portals like UNFI or KeHE that don't offer integrations. Starch also syncs your Gmail so deduction notices and distributor emails get matched to the right promo event.

Prompts to copy

Build me a trade spend tracker that logs each promotion by retailer account and SKU, pulls my Plaid transactions to match actual deductions against planned spend, and calculates sales lift by comparing Shopify revenue in the promo window to the four-week baseline before it

Build me a retail analytics dashboard that shows sell-through velocity by store and region, flags any SKU with a distribution void at more than 10% of my accounts, and lets me filter by retailer — Whole Foods, Sprouts, Target — so I can prep for buyer reviews without pulling numbers manually

Every Monday morning, email me a promo performance summary: which promotions ran last week, what the actual deduction was versus what I budgeted, and which accounts are running below target velocity

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid as a scheduled-sync source — your bank transactions sync automatically so every scan-back, off-invoice allowance, and deduction is captured without manual entry.

2 Connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries your order data live to establish pre-promotion revenue baselines and calculate lift during each event window.

3 For retailer portals (UNFI, KeHE, SPINS, your regional distributor's web dashboard) that don't have APIs, set up browser automation — Starch logs in and pulls sell-through data on a schedule, no integration required.

4 Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync source so deduction backup documents and distributor emails automatically route into the right promo event record instead of sitting in your inbox.

5 Open the Trade Spend Tracker (currently in development — request beta access) and describe your promo calendar: accounts, event types, planned spend per event, and the SKUs involved.

6 Open the Retail Analytics app (currently in development — request beta access) and describe which retailer accounts and regions you want to track, and what velocity thresholds should trigger a void alert.

7 Set a weekly automation: every Monday, reconcile last week's Plaid deductions against planned trade spend and surface any event where actual spend exceeded budget by more than 10%.

8 Set a pre-buyer-review automation: 48 hours before any retailer meeting on your Google Calendar, pull the last 90 days of sell-through data for that account and generate a one-page performance summary.

9 Build a promo lift calculation view — for each completed event, compare revenue in the promo window to the four-week pre-promo baseline, and flag promotions where lift didn't cover the trade spend cost.

10 Publish a broker activity view that maps each broker's territory to distribution voids and velocity gaps, so quarterly reviews have actual numbers instead of anecdotes.

11 Run a scenario: 'If I cut the display allowance at this account by 20%, what does my net revenue look like at current velocity?' — describe it to Starch and it models it from your connected data.

12 Each quarter, pull a full promo calendar report — plan vs. actual spend by account, lift per event, total trade spend as a percentage of gross revenue — and feed it directly into your investor update.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q1 2026 Whole Foods Rocky Mountain Promo Review

Sample numbers from a real run

Planned trade spend — WF Rocky Mountain TPR	14,000
Actual deductions (Plaid — matched)	16,200
Incremental revenue during promo window (Shopify + POS)	38,500
Pre-promo 4-week baseline revenue (same accounts)	29,100
Net lift after trade spend	7,100

You ran a temporary price reduction at Whole Foods Rocky Mountain in February — 15% off your top two SKUs, displayed at endcap. Planned spend was $14,000 against a projected $12,000 lift. When the deduction hit your bank in mid-March, Plaid caught it at $16,200 — $2,200 over budget. Starch flagged the variance automatically on Monday morning. Pulling Shopify DTC revenue plus POS sell-through from the Rocky Mountain region (via browser automation from the UNFI portal), the actual incremental revenue during the four-week window was $38,500 against a $29,100 baseline — a $9,400 gross lift. After the $16,200 deduction, net lift was $7,100, roughly 60% of what you'd projected. Not a disaster, but not a repeat either. You walk into the next buyer meeting with this breakdown — by store, by SKU, with the variance explained — instead of shrugging when they ask how the promo performed.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Trade spend as a percentage of gross revenue (target: stay under 20%)

Promotional lift — incremental revenue per event minus trade spend cost

Plan-to-actual deduction variance by account and event

Sell-through velocity by SKU and store (units per store per week)

Distribution void rate — percentage of authorized accounts with zero velocity in a 30-day window

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Google Sheets promo calendar + manual bank reconciliation

Free but someone has to update it — deductions hit your account and sit unmatched until a human notices, which is usually after the next promo has already started.

SPINS syndicated data subscription

Deep category benchmarking, but costs $2,000–$5,000/month, reports come on a lag, and you still need a separate tool to track what you're spending on trade vs. what you're getting back.

Repsly or Pica9 for field execution tracking

Good for tracking in-store compliance if you have a field team, but doesn't connect to your actual trade spend deductions or bank transactions — you still need to reconcile manually.

QuickBooks with manual trade spend categories

Captures the deduction eventually, but has no promotion context — you can see that $16,000 left your account, not which event it was for or what lift it generated.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — trade spend tracker, retail analytics all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My distributors use UNFI or KeHE portals — can Starch actually pull sell-through data from those?

Yes. Starch automates your browser — no API needed. It logs into the distributor portal the same way you do and pulls the sell-through data on a schedule. If you can see it in a browser, Starch can get it.

Are Trade Spend Tracker and Retail Analytics available right now?

Both are currently in development. You can request beta access through Starch to get notified when they launch. In the meantime, you can describe what you need to Starch in natural language — 'build me a promo tracker that matches Plaid deductions to my promo calendar and calculates lift from Shopify' — and it will build a custom version from your connected data today.

I track trade spend in QuickBooks — will this replace that?

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data directly (invoices, payments, bills, journal entries — all on a schedule), so your existing QuickBooks records feed into the trade spend view automatically. The difference is that Starch adds the promotion context QuickBooks doesn't have — which event, which account, what the lift was — so a deduction is no longer just a number in a ledger.

Does this work if I sell DTC through Shopify and through retail — or only one or the other?

It works across both. Shopify order data is queried live from Starch's integration catalog, so your DTC revenue is always in scope. Retail sell-through comes in either through distributor portal browser automation or directly from POS data you have access to. You can run lift calculations that include both channels, which is how you find out whether a Whole Foods promo cannibalized your Shopify sales or actually grew total demand.

Is my financial data secure? I'm connecting Plaid and bank accounts.

Starch uses Plaid's standard read-only connection — the same one you'd use for any finance app. Starch does not have write access to your bank. One honest thing to know: Starch is not yet SOC 2 Type II certified. If that's a hard requirement for your business, it's worth asking the team directly about their security posture and timeline.

What if a retailer runs a deduction I didn't authorize — will this catch it?

Yes. Because Starch matches incoming Plaid deductions against your planned promo calendar, anything that hits your account without a matching event gets flagged automatically. You'll see it in your Monday summary before you would have noticed it manually.