Originally Ed Mehlman & Associates Formerly Enduring Retail Audit Now Mehlman & Co.

Mehlman & Co.

Recovery Auditing & Consulting

Boutique by design since 1984.

40+
Years of deep retail expertise, vendor knowledge, and best practice.
Highest
Net recoveries in the industry — pure profit to your bottom line.
Zero
Offshore. Every auditor, analyst, and senior lead U.S.‑based.
100%
Contingency. No recoveries, no fees. Risk entirely ours.

Where others go surface level, we go deep.

1984 The year we chose depth.
We have never left it.
The deepest recovery audit in the industry, delivered by a carefully assembled team of U.S.-based experts. Forty years of institutional knowledge, applied to your accounts payable. The highest net recoveries, the strongest vendor relationships, and the lowest reversal rates — on a contingency-only basis.
What others do

Large firms chasing scale. Generalist auditors, mostly low-cost offshore labor. Standardized basic scripts run across hundreds of clients. The easy finds only — the deeper recoveries, the ones a trained eye would catch, go undiscovered and unrecovered.

What we do

Small teams of senior U.S.-based auditors. Custom software built for your environment. Deep knowledge of your industry, your vendors, your operating rhythms. The recoveries others miss are where our rate earns itself back many times over.

— Six principles

Fewer audits. Finer work.

I

Boutique by design

We stay small deliberately. We bid only for engagements where we are confident we are the best firm for the work. No exceptions.

II

A partner, not a vendor

Clients describe us as an extension of their team. We heed your guidance. We adapt to your culture. A resource, always.

III

Zero offshore

Every auditor, every analyst, every correspondence — in-house and U.S.-based.

IV

Superior technology

Built completely in-house, continuously re-engineered, tailored to each engagement. Nothing else in the industry comes close.

V

Tactful vendor relations

Recovery is a relationship business. Every vendor interaction handled with care. Your relationships strengthen, they do not strain.

VI

The buck stops with us

First or second pass, we find what others miss. Clients successfully engage us after competitor audits. Depth takes time. Forty years of it.

§

Four decades of evidence.
A record that speaks for itself.

0+
Fortune 1000 audits completed
0+
Years of practice
0%+
Client retention rate
0%
U.S.-based experts. Zero offshore.

Without continuous review,
margin quietly erodes.

Pricing errors, missed discounts, unapplied allowances, and cost drift compound silently — year over year — without anyone noticing. Regular deep testing catches errors early, recovers what is owed, and signals to vendors that all terms and details are actively reviewed.

Without Mehlman & Co.
Margin drifts
  • Pricing errors compound undetected
  • Missed discounts go unrecovered
  • Cost drift slowly erodes profit
  • Vendors lack accountability
  • Process issues become patterns
With Mehlman & Co.
Margin protected, strengthened
  • Errors caught early, recoveries captured
  • Pure-profit dollars return to your P&L
  • Vendor pricing actively monitored
  • Systemic issues surfaced and resolved
  • Ongoing partnership, compounding value

The pattern is consistent across every retailer we've worked with.

The dollars are the beginning. Not the end.

Systemic insight

Opportunities surface with every recovery. Problems caught early. Processes tightened. Operations improve, not just the balance sheet.

Minimal team effort

We handle the work. Weekly reports keep you informed. Decisions visible at your cadence. We make your life easier, not harder.

Industry benchmarks

Four decades of data on vendors, market terms, and claim types. Institutional memory you inherit, not build.

Every net dollar we recover is
pure profit.

Step one
We recover overpayments from your AP. You pay our contingency fee only on what is actually collected.
Step two
The net amount flows to your bottom line as pure profit. No cost of goods. No operating expense. Just margin returned.
Step three
At a five-percent margin, every million recovered is the profit equivalent of twenty million in incremental sales.

And our value does not end with recoveries. Every cycle adds. Every engagement builds on the last.

Where recovery lives.

We always conduct a completely thorough review across more than 100 distinct claim types — all the basic tests plus the deeper work where the real opportunity lives.

01
Deep Costing Analysis

Costing and discount compliance is the quiet backbone of margin protection. Market-price tracking through lead and transit, terms across surrounding POs, promotional cost behavior, drop-ship IMU analysis. Where other firms skim, we reconcile.

02
Contract & Discount Compliance

Rebates, allowances, anticipation terms, special pricing, trade discount rates, event pricing, price protection. Every contractual lever has an adjustment when it's missed. We find them all.

03
Freight & Logistics Review

Prepaid charges, backorder freight, miscalculated rates, unauthorized routing, CWT and pickup allowances, carrier-contract compliance. Freight is where margin quietly leaks — we find where.

04
Custom Software & Analytics

Our analytics stack is written in-house and rebuilt as the work demands — tailored to each engagement. Our Infinity Data Engine supports long-horizon audits others cannot run.

05
Duplicate & Overpayment Recovery

Every audit includes rigorous duplicate testing — but we go further than most. Our proprietary five-dimensional approach finds what industry-standard scripts miss: vendor-ID errors, fuzzy matches, iteration duplicates, PO-level discrepancies.

06
Vendor Statement Reconciliation

A thorough statement audit is standard practice. Where we differ: we reconcile vendor statements to AP files rather than simply monetizing returned credits. Only what is contractually owed — nothing more, preserving your vendor relationships.

Read the case study

Forty years.
More than eight hundred engagements.

We have had the privilege of serving some of the most storied names in American commerce. We protect our clients' discretion; our engagement history remains with us.

Major U.S. Specialty
Department Store
Leading National
Department Store Group
Regional
Department Store Chain
North American
Department Store Group
Mid-Atlantic
Department Store
Luxury
Department Store
National
Fashion & Apparel Retailer
Specialty
Home & Furniture Retailer
Global
Footwear Retailer
National
Discount Retailer
National
Grocery Leader
Leading Regional
Grocery Group
Regional
Supermarket Chain
Midwest
Grocery Group
Off-Price
Retail Chain
Casual Dining
Restaurant Group
Big-Box
Home Improvement
Fortune 500
Industrial Manufacturer
Global
Logistics & Freight Firm
Specialty
Retail Chain

A complete software rebuild.
Claim types others cannot reach.

Recently, the firm undertook a ground-up redesign of its proprietary analytics stack — rebuilding from first principles, applying modern data engineering to four decades of accumulated methodology.

We went deeper on claim types others don't have the capability to find — market-price tracking through lead and transit time, terms monitoring across surrounding purchase orders, cost behavior before, during, and after promotional windows, drop-ship IMU analysis, and beyond. Our custom software runs these analyses at a scale other firms cannot match.

One major department-store client
10×
per 6-month cycle
Our analytics stack
Now
the industry's most advanced

A consistent record across decades: fewer than 9% of our processed claims are ever cancelled — and more than 90% of our audits recover more than one-tenth of one percent of gross revenue.

The last fifteen years have been a difficult stretch for American retail. Our work has continued steadily through all of it — finding recoveries, protecting margins, correcting errors at scale. And it has helped many of our clients weather cycles their peers could not. That is what depth delivers. That is the work we do.

— And the work continues

Development never pauses. We continually refine our tooling, benchmark new claim categories, and invest in the analytics stack. Every client, past and present, becomes a perpetual beneficiary — of every optimization, every new heuristic, every piece of cutting-edge infrastructure we build.

This is one example. Every engagement receives the same rigor.

Tim Mehlman, President

Tim Mehlman

President
There's no offshore team on the other end. No handoff to junior staff. You get me and my A-team of senior experts — and forty years of benchmarks on every vendor, every market term, every claim type.

Rice-educated mathematician and former J.P. Morgan analyst. A deeply technical software engineer — a rare combination of credentials for this industry — and the lead architect behind every piece of the firm's tooling. His ground-up redesign of the analytics stack unlocked depth the rest of the industry cannot reach. As just one example: for a major department-store client, recoveries now run ten-fold what they did before the redesign.

Meet the rest of our leadership

214 · 335 · 3913
Mehlman & Co.
Recovery Auditing & Consulting
Tim Mehlman
President
Houston, TX  ·  Tim@MehlmanAndCo.com  ·  MehlmanAndCo.com
Mehlman & Co.
Boutique by design since 1984
§

Discover what forty years
of depth can find in your AP.

Reach out. A conversation is the best place to start — no commitment, just an honest discussion of what recovery looks like for your organization.

Or send a note.