When goods come back

Before you start, open this page: Sales / Customer returns.

Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.

Returns are where careless record-keeping gets expensive, because a return touches the goods, the money and the customer’s trust all at once.

A return attaches to the document that sold the goods

A customer return points at either the invoice or the order the goods went out on. One of the two is required.

The invoice is the normal one. It makes the refund checkable, and it tells you the price the goods actually sold at.

A return against an order is for when goods come back before any invoice was written.

Either way, a return is never floating on its own. Goods come back from a particular sale, at a particular price. That is what makes the refund arithmetic something you can check.

A return happens in stages, not all at once

A return moves through these: received, inspected, then either restocked or scrapped. Or cancelled.

Inspection can carry notes. Scrapping carries a reason.

Those stages matter, because the interesting question is rarely “was it returned”. It is “did we get sellable goods back, or did we take a loss, and why”.

   received  ->  inspected  ->  restocked   goods back on the shelf
                          \->  scrapped    a loss, with a reason

Restocked and scrapped are different outcomes. Never record one as the other.

Restocking puts sellable goods back into your numbers. Scrapping does not.

A business that restocks everything out of habit ends up with stock that does not exist, and a profit figure it cannot explain.

Write down the reason

Scrapped items with reasons are how you find out that one supplier’s packaging keeps failing in transit. Or that a product comes back with the same fault every week.

“Damaged” is a start.

“Damaged. Carton crushed, third one this month from the same supplier.” is worth money.

This page lives with Stock, not Sales

Worth flagging, because it surprises people. Customer returns is switched on together with Stock, not Sales.

If your business sells but does not track stock, you may not have it. Which makes sense, because the interesting half of a return is what happens to the goods.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, create a return against an invoice and walk it through received, inspected and restocked.

Then do a second one and scrap it with a reason. Compare what each one did to your stock numbers.