Returnable containers with deposit - anyone doing this?

curryj

Well Known Member
We sell milk, mostly in paper cartons and plastic jugs, and we ship most of it in plastic crates of the type that, if you're old enough, you may have used at one point in your life to store your record albums in. Our delivery people pick up the empties at the customer's location every time they deliver some full ones.
Up until now, we haven't been tracking these crates in our systems at all. They cost 3 or 4 dollars each, and because they're so handy for organizing things, building temporary displays, etc. we lose a lot of them - to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars annually.
There's an industry initiative to look at putting a deposit / refund system in place to cover these.
I found a white paper on Container Management in World (attached), and it looks pretty good, but I'm not sure it's a great fit. It looks like we would need to set up all our items over again as full crates, and these would need all the pricing, discounts, rebates, etc. set up for them as well as the uncrated items. Also there's a process to fill the crates which would have to be run.
Does anybody else out there do something like this within World, maybe for pallets or soda pop shippers, and how did you set it up?
 

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I've had a similar issue but probably on a smaller scale these were IBC 1000 Lt containers of additives in the oil industry

We use 'Free Goods' in Advance Pricing to charge a deposit to the customer for the container. He is then automatically billed...

You will then need a separate process to raise credits for the returns he makes....

This is quite a simple solution and if you use consolidated invoicing, he can see the crates he has paid for by delivery and those that he has returned...

You just need to set up the crate as a stock item...

Hope this helps

Regards

Gareth
 
If they are worth enough to the company that you need a solution I would suggest you start tracking them in inventory. Create an item number that represents these crates. If you have different type of crates create a few different item numbers.

This solutions isn't elegant but... it should work. Charge a deposit on the original order and credit that amount when the crates are returned.

For each sales order you send out using these crates add 2 new lines to the sales order
-one with a standard Stock line type for shipping out the crate and charging the deposit.
-and a second with a new "CT" container return line type set it to reverse the sign. Create new order activity rules for this line type ex. 520-568, 568-580, 580-620, 620-999. Create a new version of ship confirm to be used to confirm crate returns at the 568 status and advance to 580 for crediting the customer.

The sales order would look something like this.
2 ABC_Crates 10.00$ S 520-540
-2 ABC_Crates -10.00$ CT 520-568

Good Luck
 
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