Every Friday, thousands of distributors get a settlement, glance at the net, and file it in a drawer. That glance costs real money. In eleven years on a route, nearly every mistake I found — and there were plenty — was sitting in the middle lines nobody reads.

The good news: a settlement isn’t complicated. It’s five sections that always work the same way. Once you can read them, checking one takes minutes.

The five sections of every settlement

Whatever your company calls them, the pieces are the same: gross delivered (what you sold in), allowances and promos (discounts your company funded — or says it funded), credits (stales and damages coming back to you), deductions (chargebacks, fees, holdbacks), and net pay.

Start with the top line, not the bottom

The net moves for a dozen reasons, so it tells you almost nothing on its own. Gross delivered is the number you can verify — it should equal the sum of your delivery invoices for the week. If gross is right and net looks wrong, the problem is in the middle, and now you know where to dig.

The three lines that hide mistakes

Promo allowances: check that promo deductions match promotions that actually ran — wrong store, wrong week, and wrong product are all common. Chargebacks: learn your company’s six or seven common codes and question any you’ve never seen. Stale credits: compare credits received against claims filed, because a claim that never lands isn’t a claim — it’s a donation.

The ten-minute weekly habit

Same time every week, settlement in hand: check gross against your invoices, scan the deduction codes, tick off which filed claims got credited. The first week takes half an hour because everything is new. By week four it’s ten minutes — and it’s the highest-paid ten minutes in your week.