The Company

Safety Express is Canada's leading supplier of products and services for specialty contractors, offering specialized equipment sales, rentals, repairs, and education tailored to property damage restoration, hazardous material abatement, surface preparation, and professional cleaning sectors. Since its establishment in 1986, the company has earned a reputation as a trusted partner for specialty contractors across the country. In 2015, Safety Express joined Aramsco, Inc., a leading U.S. distributor serving similar customer segments.  

As Director of Strategic Initiatives, Ashley Copeland oversees marketing, merchandising, and supply chain operations, playing a pivotal role in strategic initiatives, including rebate management.

Leveraging Rebates as a Strategic Advantage

Traditionally, rebates play a role in managing clash flow and maintaining financial balance. “It’s a competitive marketplace,” says Copeland. “When we need to adjust prices to win business, rebates help us maintain back-end margin and financial stability. In addition to collecting rebates from our vendors, we also offer rebates to key customers. This requires focus on balancing inflows and outflows and ensuring healthy cash flow.”  

At Safety Express rebates are more than just a margin recovery tool–they are a strategic approach to strengthening partnerships, creating shared value, and unlocking innovation with both vendors and customers.  

On the vendor side, rebates serve as a foundation for strategic alignment. These agreements go beyond transactional incentives; they build loyalty and mutual commitment, creating space for joint planning and shared growth initiatives. “Rebates create an opportunity for true two-way partnerships,” says Copeland. “They allow us to collaborate with our vendors on programs that remove friction from in the supply chain, reduce the cost of doing business, and align incentives to grow together.”

On the customer side, rebates are used strategically to build consultive, solutions-focused relationships, not just blanket incentives. “Customer rebates open the door to real strategic conversation,” says Copland. “We talk about product mix, service bundles, and how we can design programs that deliver shared success.” By providing sales teams with visibility into rebate progress, Safety Express empowers proactive engagement, helping customers make smarter purchasing decisions and unlock greater value. “When customers see they’re close to a rebate tier, we can help them get there. It benefits them, it benefits us, and it deepens the relationship.” Copeland adds.

The Challenges

Managing 71 Unique Rebate Programs

With over 70 rebate programs, each with distinct structures—tiered rates, varying payment schedules, and specific terms—tracking rebates in Excel became unmanageable. The process was cumbersome to update, prone to errors, and required extensive time for validation.

“Every program was different; Excel simply couldn’t keep up,” says Copeland. “At year-end, we often found discrepancies between what we accrued and what we actually received. It used to take several people multiple days each quarter just to verify the data.”

She adds, “When we looked at tracking group rebates on the vendor side, the key question was: can we do this accurately—and adjust in real time—if we’re relying on manual tracking? Even with our standard growth rebates, having them automatically start accruing once we hit a threshold—and dynamically adjusting percentages—makes a huge difference.”

Growth-Based Rebates

Some rebates are straightforward, like base rebates—where purchasing a set amount earns a specific percentage back. “If all our rebates worked that way, they would be easy to manage. On the other hand, if this were the case, the programs wouldn’t be serving their purpose as strategic tools.” Copeland notes. “Many of our programs have growth components, and that’s where things get a little more complicated.”

Growth-based rebates depend on surpassing previous years’ sales, with different percentage tiers. To add even more complexity, some vendor programs have group growth rebates, which involve entire buying groups—if the group collectively grows year over year, different rebate tiers are triggered.

“In Excel, as you can imagine, those are extremely hard to track. At year-end we found discrepancies between what we had accrued and what we received, making it hard to reconcile revenue” Copeland explains. “Enable allows us to model these properly and start accruing as we trend toward the target. This helps us get much closer to the actual number at quarter-end,” she explains.

Aligning on Terms and Interpretation

A key challenge in managing rebates is ensuring that both Safety Express and its vendors have a shared understanding of the terms.

“Our understanding of a rebate program and our vendor’s understanding may be different,” says Copeland. “With some of our smaller vendors, the agreements were a little less formal—sometimes just drafted in an email or a documented conversation.”

With Enable, Safety Express now has structured workflows to ensure clarity. “We have the ability to get agreement signoffs, making sure we’re tracking the same thing on both sides,” Copeland explains.

Another common discrepancy arises with the timing in which rebates values are captured. “Sometimes vendors prefer to capture rebates based on invoiced amounts on their end versus received amounts on ours, which can create a gap,” she notes. “Having these conversations early in the process ensures we’re on the same wavelength about what will happen at the end of the term.”

By formalizing rebate agreements and improving documentation, Safety Express enhances transparency, reduces disputes, and strengthens vendor relationships.

The Platform

Choosing Enable for Rebate Management

After exploring internal solutions and other platforms, Safety Express chose Enable through its partnership with buying-group, AD. “We tried building something internally, but it didn’t gain traction” says Copeland. “Enable came highly recommended, and once we engaged with their team, it was clear they understood our rebate management needs.”  

Quick and Smooth Implementation

Copeland was pleasantly surprised by how efficiently Safety Express was able to implement the Enable platform, thanks in large part to Enable’s collaborative and hands-on approach.

“I was really surprised at how quickly we were able to implement the Enable platform,” Copeland shares. “The Enable team was fantastic. Our meetings weren’t just high-level check-ins; they were active working sessions where the Enable team shadowed ours and helped us build in real time.”

This hands-on approach made all the difference. “It’s hard to fully grasp a system until you’re in it. Having our team actively go through the motions on those calls gave them momentum to move forward quickly,” Copeland explains. “Instead of feeling stuck or hesitant, our team came to the next meeting having made significant progress.”

By fostering an environment of ownership and collaboration, Enable helped accelerate the rollout while empowering Safety Express’ internal teams to take charge of the process. “The collaborative nature of the implementation gave our team the confidence to take control and keep pushing forward,” she adds. “It wasn’t about waiting for direction, it was about learning by doing, together.”

Finance Team's Transition to Using Enable

While the finance team was initially cautious about moving away from their familiar Excel-based processes, the shift to Enable quickly proved transformational.

“Managing rebates in Excel was incredibly time-consuming and challenging for them,” says Copeland. “That said, initially, there was natural hesitation is making a change. It takes time to get comfortable letting go of something you’ve relied on for so long.”

To build confidence, the team adopted a dual approach, running side-by-side validations between the legacy Excel method and Enable’s automated system. “We committed to running both systems in parallel for a couple of months,” Copeland explains. “That gave the team the assurance that Enable could match or exceed what they were doing manually.”

The breakthrough moment came at the end of 2024, with the year-end comparison. “When we saw the difference–especially in how Enable captured growth-based and more complex programs, it was a real eye-opener,” she recalls. “It showed us how much we had been missing even with the effort we were all putting in.” That validation didn’t just convert the finance team, it sparked enthusiasm across the organization.

Discovering $204K In Unaccrued Rebates

By leveraging Enable, Safety Express uncovered $204,000 in unaccrued rebates—funds that would have otherwise gone unrecognized under the old system.  

“These were mostly growth rebates we wouldn’t have captured within the correct fiscal year,” says Copeland. With Enable, Safety Express now ensures that all eligible rebates are accurately recognized, improving financial accuracy and optimizing cash flow.  

Tracking Intercompany Rebates with Ease

Intercompany rebates are inherently complex and often time-consuming to accrue. In fact, Safety Express nearly missed out on $11,000 in rebate payments from its parent company, Aramsco, due to the limitations of manual tracking.

Copeland tells us, “All of our intercompany purchases fall under a single account. We used to rely on manual, visual reviews of those transactions to try and identify which rebates our parent company was collecting—so we could pull them in on our end.” The manual process was not only inefficient, but also vulnerable to human error and oversight.  

With Enable, Safety Express can now track intercompany rebates with minimal effort. “I hesitate to say, ‘set it and forget it,’ but that’s almost what it feels like once it’s configured properly. It will continue to save us a significant amount of time every quarter.”

This new process helped Safety Express recover just over $11K in intercompany rebates, but more importantly, it laid foundation for consistent, automated capture going forward.

Saving Time and Increasing Accuracy

Managing rebates manually was a significant time-investment for multiple teams across Safety Express. Every quarter, critical hours were spent validating data, reconciling spreadsheets, and generating reports, often with limited accuracy in return.

“One intercompany account alone took half a day to validate,” say Copeland. “And when you look across all our rebate programs, it was a massive time drain. Finance was buried in it, our vendor team spent hours, and even sales had to pull reports to provide visibility to customers.”  

“Even with all that work, we couldn’t guarantee 100% accuracy,” Copeland explains. “It started to feel like something we just had to–going through the motions without having a reliable way to capture the information we actually needed.”

Building Strategic Relationships

Since implementing Enable, Safety Express has been able to shift its focus from reconciliation to relationship building. With automation managing the heavy lifting, internal teams can spend their time on more strategic and value-added activities. “Now we can use that time to have more meaningful conversations with our vendors and customers,” Copeland notes. “That’s the real value for us; having the right data, when we need it, and using it to deepen our partnerships.”

From Manual Reporting to Comprehensive Insights

Previously, the finance team at Safety Express relied on data pulled from the ERP system, which was then keyed into an Excel file to track purchases, sales, and rebates. While this approach worked to a degree, it was time-consuming and prone to errors, especially given the complexity of many of the programs.

“It was effective to a point, but it still required a lot of manual review because of how complex the programs were,” says Copeland.

With Enable, the process has become much more streamlined and accurate. “Reporting is now automated, centralized, and significantly more accurate. The reports our finance team is getting from Enable are far more comprehensive and there is less doubt and second-guessing.”

This transition has significantly reduced the time spent on manual checks, allowing the finance team to focus on higher-value, more strategic work.

Enhanced Visibility for Vendor Programs

One of the most impactful benefits of using Enable has been the increased visibility it provides into both vendor and customer progress. This real-time transparency is helping Safety Express unlock more collaborative and purposeful conversations across their business.

“I think the visibility component is huge,” says Copeland. “It allows us to see how our programs are progressing compared to our shared goals. That clarity creates more space for open, valuable conversations across the business.” With Enable, teams can proactively manage performance against rebate targets, identify opportunities, and engage partners with data-backed insights.

“Enable has given us the visibility we were missing,” Copeland adds. “it’s also added capacity for our team to build more strategic long-term programs, both with vendors and with our customers.

Streamlined Rebate Workflows  

With Enable, Safety Express has eliminated the need for manual coordination across departments, replacing outdated processes with automated workflows that drive speed, consistency, and visibility.

“Previously, we had programs stored in SharePoint, and everything depended on manual communication,” Copeland explains. “Category managers or sales had to notify procurement and finance directly when new programs were added. It was easy for things to get missed. Now, with Enable, the workflows are built in. As soon as a program is created, it flows through the system and alerts the right departments–no follow up needed.”

The automated workflows in Enable have significantly improved operational efficiency at Safety Express by eliminating manual handoffs and ensuring timely communication across departments. “As we start to see the impact of the workflows, the value of Enable will just keep compounding year over year,” Copeland explains.

Rebate Claims and Settlements Made Easier

Safety Express anticipates a smoother and more efficient claims and settlement process with Enable’s structured approach to rebate management.

“We’re confident this process is going to be a lot easier now,” says Copeland. “The clarifying conversations happened upfront, the programs are signed off, and the documentation is in place. It’s a much more formalized and predictable process than it used to be.”

Having full-year visibility into rebate programs allows the team stay ahead of potential issues and maintain alignment with vendors and customers from day one. “With the time we’ve freed-up, we’re able to maintain ongoing dialogue throughout the year. By the end of the term, there are no surprises,” Copeland explains. “Everyone’s been on the same page, tracking towards the same goals.”

As a result, Safety Express expects to collect more rebates and streamline the entire process. “We’ll have more time to set up new programs, and it’ll be easier to collect because everyone will be aligned on what the program was from the start,” Copeland adds.

Increasing Sales Through Transparency and Time Savings

Enable is helping Safety Express drive more sales by providing teams with real-time visibility and freeing them from time-consuming manual tasks.

“The visibility Enable gives our buyers and salespeople is huge,” says Copeland. “Instead of spending time validating rebates, we’re now focused on creating new programs and driving growth.”

With the extra time gained from automating rebate tracking, the team can focus on strategic decision-making. “Our buyers can analyze the data, see when we’re approaching a rebate or growth tier, and make informed decisions that directly benefit the business,” Copeland explains.

This transparency extends to the customer relationship, enabling sales teams to create value on both sides. “On the customer side, we can guide them toward rebate opportunities that benefit them and us,” Copeland adds. “It all comes down to transparency and time, and Enable gives us more of both.”