Year-End Close: Turn Holiday Data into Buyer Wins
- Jon Allen
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Year-end close can feel like a necessary evil. Accruals. Reclasses. Deductions. Spreadsheets everywhere.
But here’s the opportunity: the same work you are doing to close the books can help you open the story you tell buyers in 2026.
Holiday performance is a big part of that story. NRF notes that holiday sales have historically grown faster than overall retail, and online continues to outpace stores, with many forecasts calling for 7–9% annual growth in e-commerce.
Visa’s holiday data shows total U.S. holiday retail spending up 4.8%, with online spending up 7.1%, reinforcing that the mix keeps shifting toward digital and omnichannel.
If you can connect your holiday numbers, deductions, and operational fixes into one clean narrative, you walk into line reviews with a very different kind of confidence.
The two halves of year-end work
Think of year-end as two complementary jobs:
Closing the books
Cleaning up open deductions and disputes
Aligning trade accruals with reality (not wishful thinking)
Making sure you’re not leaving recoveries stranded in 2025 accounts payable (AP)
Opening the story
Translating 2025 holiday data into a 2026 buyer narrative
Distilling POS, margin, and compliance into something a time-starved merchant can digest
Most teams over-index on the first job and under-invest in the second. You need both.
Three questions to answer before you sit with a buyer
Before you present 2026 plans, make sure you can answer these, on one page each:
What worked—and at what true net margin?
Holiday promos that beat the category, with clear net after:
Trade spend
Deductions (price variance, OTIF, compliance)
Returns and defectives
Not just “we grew 8%,” but “we grew 8% at a sustainable margin.”
What did not work—and what did you already fix?
Own the misses: underperforming events, supply issues, or execution gaps.
Pair each one with a concrete fix: new routing processes, updated packaging, improved price-file controls.
Where did you outperform the category or private label—and can you prove it?
A simple chart that shows your:
Holiday growth vs. category
Share gains in key weeks
Strength vs. private label in specific price bands or pack sizes
Buyers don’t have time for 30-page decks. They do have time for a few sharp charts that say, “We understand our business, and we’ve already acted on what we learned.”
Using deduction data as a strategic asset (not just a headache)
Most suppliers treat deduction reports like a collections problem. You can do better.
Start mining your deduction data for patterns that support your story:
“We listened and fixed it” narrative
Show that you reduced certain chargeback codes (for example, label errors or late shipments) quarter over quarter.
Tie that reduction to specific actions: new 3PL, new carton labeling process, tighter appointment scheduling.
Proof that you’re a lower-risk partner
Highlight improvements in on-time in-full (OTIF) performance.
Track fewer price variance disputes after you tightened promo setup.
Category context
When possible, benchmark your deduction profile against peer norms.
Being “cleaner” than competitors is a real selling point, especially in complex categories.
When you frame deductions this way, they move from “bad news we hope no one asks about” to “evidence that we run a tighter operation every year.”
Fictional example (for illustration only)
Fictional example (not a real brand):A beverage brand heads into its spring line review with a new approach. Instead of a 40-page slide deck, they bring two charts and a one-page story. Chart 1 shows a 6% holiday sales lift vs. category, with clear POS curves by week. Chart 2 shows a 30% reduction in compliance deductions after a routing-guide overhaul and new 3PL onboarding. Their narrative to the buyer is simple:“We grew faster than the category and reduced the headaches in your supply chain. Here’s what we did, here’s the impact, and here’s how we plan to build on it.” The buyer doesn’t need to take their word for it—the numbers tell the story.
That’s the power of linking year-end close work to next year’s pitch.
Where Woodridge fits in this picture
At Woodridge Retail Group, we sit in a lot of these conversations—from helping brands untangle deduction reports with partners like HRG to shaping the story suppliers bring to their merchants.
What we’ve seen over and over:
The brands that win don’t just show growth—they show maturity.
They can talk about holiday and year-end performance in terms buyers care about: growth, reliability, and reduced friction.
They use the “ugly” year-end work (deductions, audits, accruals) as raw material for a better buyer story.
You don’t have to turn your finance team into marketers. You need to connect the dots between the work they are already doing—and the story that will earn you more space, more support, and more trust in 2026.
