Blog · Wallet share and penetration · Construction and building materials
How a merchant or building materials manufacturer measures share of each contractor's spend by category from the trade ledger: categories bought against the norm, lapsed trade accounts per branch, an optional project overlay, and the reconciliation to invoiced sales.
A branch manager at a builders' merchant knows the top twenty trade accounts and their site managers by name. Below them sit hundreds of contractors buying timber and nothing else, and dozens who used to buy weekly and have gone quiet. Both lists are in the trade ledger. This guide shows how to get them out per branch and reconcile them to invoiced sales.
Per trade account:
Category share = categories bought ÷ categories in the norm for the contractor's type Lapsed = no purchase in the larger of the global window and three times the account's own interval
Per branch:
Gap value by category, lapsed value by account, and the active account count against the trailing year
Account identifiers only.
invoiced sales = Σ regions = Σ branches = Σ accounts = Σ categories
The by-branch equality catches an account served by two branches after a boundary change. The by-category one catches a category merged in the merchant system.
Small contractor band, norm of four categories. One account at one branch.
| Category | Bought | Trailing 12m | In norm | Gap at margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Timber | Yes | £41,000 | Yes | |
| Aggregates | Yes | £9,000 | Yes | |
| Plumbing | No | Yes | £3,400 | |
| Electrical | No | Yes | £2,900 | |
| Tools | No | No |
Half the norm, £6,300 of gap at margin. The same branch has 84 lapsed accounts by the rule above, worth £310,000 in the year before they stopped. The two lists together are the branch's quarter, and the counter staff work the first while the rep works the second.
Where the merchant buys planning data, active projects in the branch's area are matched to trade accounts by the contractor named on the application. Projects with no supplying account are a prospect list. It is an overlay because it depends on data the merchant may not have; the ledger measures do not.
Cash account. The generic counter account is the biggest account at every branch. Exclude it from the account measures and show its value separately.
Boundary changes. An account moved between branches without a date appears in both. The branch assertion fails; the fix is a dated transfer.
Lapsed for a good reason. A contractor between jobs will be back. Let the rep mark the reason and keep the account on a watch list.
Categories at the wrong level. A hierarchy with a thousand products makes every account look under-penetrated. Measure at the category the counter sells.
Mapped once, the ledger export produces the gap list and the lapsed list per branch every week, reconciled to invoiced sales. Covirage builds this from the export as it is. The construction page describes the setup, and you can upload a sample ledger export and see the roll-up on your own rows.
One with no purchase inside a window you set, ninety days being usual for active contractors. The account's own buying rhythm is a better guide: a contractor who bought every fortnight for a year and has not bought in eight weeks is lapsed whatever the global window says.
No. The category and lapsed views come from the ledger alone. Where the merchant holds planning data, an overlay shows active projects in the branch area with no supplying account, which is a prospect list rather than a coverage measure.
Counter sales booked to a generic cash account should be excluded from account measures and shown as their own line. Otherwise one account looks enormous and the real buyers are hidden.