How a £400m FMCG Manufacturer Replaced Manual EPOS Reviews with Day-Level Promotion Visibility

A multinational FMCG manufacturer supplying cooking ingredients and sauces across major UK retailers was spending significant time and resources manually crawling EPOS data to reconstruct prior-year promotions. The process was slow, error-prone and increasingly incompatible with the pace of modern financial planning.

With help from Assosia’s promotion tracking platform, the team gained immediate, day-level visibility of historical promotional activity, enabling faster base-period analysis, more accurate accrual management and the recovery of previously missed funding.

At a glance

The Challenge

Historically, the process relied on downloading large EPOS datasets and manually scanning through them to piece together promotion timing and mechanics — neither fast nor reliable.​

In an FMCG sector environment where decisions move quickly and the cost of delayed or inaccurate analysis compounds over time, a manual approach was becoming a liability.
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Assosia identified three specific pressure points that were limiting their capacity to plan and forecast with confidence.​
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Lack of precise promotion timing

Reconstructing the exact launch and completion dates of prior-year promotions from raw EPOS data was time-consuming and subject to interpretation. Without a reliable, day-level record of when promotions actually ran, base-period calculations were built on uncertain foundations.

Inefficient workflows slowing decision-making

Manual EPOS downloads and extended data trawling placed a significant burden on the team, particularly during high-pressure periods such as budgeting cycles and fiscal close. The inflexibility constrained what the team could realistically do with their time.

Accrual inaccuracies and financial exposure

Without clear visibility of historical promotional activity, accurately amending FSBG (Free Stock / Budget Gap) accruals was difficult. The risk of missing a promotion window (or overstating funding against an inaccurate base) was real, and the financial consequences accumulated quietly.

The Solution

​​Rather than building a picture from raw data files, the team could access a clean, filterable record of exactly when promotions ran at their retail partners with Assosia’s price and promotion tracking platform​

The key capabilities that made the difference:

• ​Day-level promotion tracking — precise start and end dates for each promotional period, removing the ambiguity from base-period calculations
• Rapid filtering of PY activity — the ability to quickly isolate relevant promotions by retailer, product or time period, making analysis significantly faster to complete
• Immediate visibility without EPOS dependency — a purpose-built interface replacing the need for raw file downloads entirely, reducing both time and the risk of manual error​​​

The Impact

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​The move from manual EPOS analysis to Assosia’s platform delivered immediate, measurable improvements in three areas.

Accurate base-period analysis

With precise, day-level records of when promotions ran, the team could build base run-rate calculations with a level of confidence previously impossible. The guesswork was removed, and with it, the downstream uncertainty it created in forecasting and planning.

Improved FSBG accrual management

Clear historical promotion data enabled the team to identify and accurately amend accruals that had previously been difficult to validate. The improved accuracy reduced the risk of either missing or overstating funding and gave the finance team a much firmer basis for its fiscal-year positions.

Significant time saving

Analysis that had previously required an extended EPOS review was completed in a fraction of the time. The efficiency gain was most significant during peak periods — budgeting cycles and fiscal close — when pressure on the team is highest, and the cost of slow analysis is greatest.​