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

Mehlman & Co.

Recovery Auditing, Accounting Projects, & Consulting for the Fortune 1000 and Beyond

Boutique by design since 1984.

40+
Years of deep retail expertise, vendor knowledge, and best practices.
Highest
Net recoveries in the industry — pure unrecognized profit to bottom line.
Zero
Offshore. Every team member, 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 auditing 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 that a trained eye would catch go undiscovered.

What we do

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

— Six principles

Senior teams. Higher craft.

I

Boutique by design

Senior team, every engagement — by design. 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 — and every single team member — 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

Nothing missed

Primary audit or secondary review — our clients engage us when they want every recoverable found. Where competitor audits have already run, we still find what was missed. The work isn’t done until it is.

§

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

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

Without continuous review,
margins quietly erode.

Pricing errors, missed discounts, unapplied allowances, and cost drift compound silently — year over year — without anyone noticing. Regular rigorous testing catches errors early, recovers what is owed and unrecognized, 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 and industry 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. 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 net operating 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.

Recovery amounts vary by client and project scope — we deliver a comprehensive review and present every recovery opportunity available.

Where recovery lives.

We always conduct a completely thorough review across more than 100 distinct claim types and adjustments — 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 time and transit time, 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 obligation creates a recoverable when missed. We know where to look for all of them.

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.

Forty years.
More than 1,000 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 time 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

Where other firms submit unvetted claims and leave validation to the client, we fully validate every claim before it reaches your desk. A consistent record across decades: fewer than 7% of our processed claims are ever cancelled.

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 University-educated mathematician and former J.P. Morgan Acquisition Officer for a 5-state region. 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

713 701 9217
Mehlman & Co.
Recovery Auditing & Consulting
Tim MEHLMAN
President
Houston, TX Office  ·  Tim@MehlmanAndCo.com  ·  MehlmanAndCo.com
Mehlman & Co.
Boutique by design since 1984
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Discover what forty years
of depth can find for your organization.

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

Or send a note.