Every co-op program eventually produces a report titled something like "Co-op Performance." It usually answers one of two questions while its readers assume it answers the other. Utilization asks whether the money moved. ROI asks whether moving it did anything. They need different data, different audiences, and different cadences.
Utilization: did the money move?
Utilization is a finance question. It measures the share of available funds that were actually spent or claimed, by location, by tier, by period. Its audience is the program administrator and the CFO, and its natural cadence is monthly with a hard look at quarter end.
The reason it matters is that unspent co-op is a double loss. The brand budgeted for local advertising that never happened, and the dealer left money on the table that its competitors' dealers did not. In legacy programs the numbers are grim: with 43% of manufacturer plans forbidding carryover and 85% imposing a claim deadline, large shares of accrued funds simply expire. A utilization report exists to catch that before the deadline, not to document it afterward.
The fields it needs are all ledger fields: opening balance, accrual, spend, pending, expiring, closing balance, per location per period. If the platform is the system of record for both the fund and the spend, this report is a query. If spend happens elsewhere, it is a reconciliation project.
ROI: did the spend work?
ROI is a marketing question. It connects money spent to a result: leads, redemptions, store visits, sales lift. Its audience is the marketing team and the location manager, and its cadence follows campaigns, not calendar months.
It needs a different set of fields entirely: what ran, where, when, to how many people, and what happened afterward. Impressions and clicks for digital. Households mailed and coupons redeemed for print. Sales in the trade area during the campaign window against the prior period or a control group. None of these live in a fund ledger, and no amount of utilization data will produce them.
Why programs conflate them
Because the manufacturer's proof-of-performance requirements were written to answer the utilization question. A tearsheet and a paid invoice prove the ad ran and the money was spent. They say nothing about whether anyone responded. Programs that built their reporting on top of claim documentation inherited that limitation, and "we spent 78% of the fund" became the performance metric by default.
Build both from one source
The trick is not to build two reporting systems. It is to make every spend transaction carry both kinds of data from the moment it happens. A direct mail order records its cost against the fund (utilization) and its household count, drop date, and coupon code (ROI). A digital campaign records its budget draw and its impressions and clicks. When spend runs through the same system that governs the fund, each transaction is born with both halves, and the two reports are two views of one table rather than two datasets someone has to join by hand.
What good looks like
- Utilization: every location's balance and expiring funds visible today, not at quarter end. A list of locations below 50% utilization with 60 days left, sent to their regional manager automatically.
- ROI: cost per redemption, per lead, or per visit by campaign type and by market, so the brand learns which packaged campaigns to keep offering and which to retire.
- Together: the question that actually matters to a CEO, which is whether the locations that spend their co-op outperform the ones that do not. That requires both datasets on the same location key, and it is the strongest argument a program administrator will ever have for keeping the fund alive.
Co-Op Command handles the fund, the spend, and the reporting in one system.
Request a Demo →