How Dr Water recovered $52k of deductions in 90 days with Ratio.

About Dr Water

Dr Water is a premium functional hydration brand selling across DTC, Amazon 1P, Walmart, and Erewhon. The team is twelve people across product, ops, and marketing. The finance function is just one person handling AR, AP, and remittance review, with the CEO stepping in during month-end close. Their finances are managed by a CPA firm that handles bookkeeping, tax filings, and compliance on top of QuickBooks.

The challenge

Every retailer deducted differently. Walmart short-paid via APDP with a 30-day dispute window. Amazon 1P fired chargebacks for cost discrepancies and shortage claims through Vendor Central. Erewhon emailed remittance PDFs with scan-down billbacks buried inside.

For a one-person finance function, the manual effort to claim each deduction was substantial. Every dispute meant logging into a portal, downloading the remittance, hunting for the matching POD or BOL across the 3PL's email and a shared Drive folder, and uploading a packet of evidence.

The CEO regularly stepped in during month-end close to help reconcile remittances, since the one-person finance function simply couldn't keep up. Chasing retailer deductions sat outside the scope of the CPA firm that managed Dr Water's books, so it kept rolling over to the founder.

We knew we were leaking margin every week. We just didn't have the time or the playbook to chase it. Walmart's 30-day window came and went before we'd even read the remittance.

Smile Bhateja

Co-founder & CEO, Dr Water

The solution

Ratio connected to Dr Water's existing stack in 3 days: QuickBooks via OAuth, the 3PL through shipment notifications, authorized sync to Walmart APDP and Amazon Vendor Central (Amazon over the official SP-API, Walmart over a read-only Retail Link credential), and a forwarded inbox rule for Erewhon's emailed remittance PDFs.

From there, Ratio's AI agents pull every deduction the moment it hits a remittance, match it to the corresponding invoice, POD, BOL, and (where applicable) the original promo agreement, then file the dispute through the correct channel (APDP for Walmart, Vendor Central for Amazon, email for Erewhon) well inside each retailer's dispute window. Dr Water's finance function reviews a single weekly dashboard instead of three retailer portals.

It took us two calls and an hour of integration work. By the end of week one Ratio had already filed 38 disputes that we'd have written off. By month two it was running on autopilot.

Smile Bhateja

Co-founder & CEO, Dr Water

The results

In the first 90 days of running Ratio, Dr Water's one-person finance function went from chasing deductions reactively to letting them get handled in the background.

• →$52,300 recovered in the first 90 days.
• →90% win rate on disputed claims.
• →18 hours per month freed up.
• →7.8x ROI on Ratio's fee.