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Issuing Return Merchandise Authorization Numbers

1 min read

For years, our customers have asked us “is there a way to issue Return Authorization numbers in Retail Edge for product being shipped back to us?”

It’s a good question. Return Merchandise Authorizations, otherwise known as RMAs, are pretty typical for product being sent back to the vendor. For vendor returns, you would issue a negative Purchase Order, otherwise known as a PO. But when it comes to returns to your store or business you should probably do the following:

  1. Assuming you are not issuing credits until the product has been returned.
  2. If that is the case then build the return out as a sales quote. From here you could either use the ticket number of the saved sale or maybe reference a PO# and use something like RMA-10-20-16-1. Basically using a simple code where you use today’s date and add a -1 or -2 after it depending on how many returns you are issuing a day.

Then once the product arrives you can post out the saved sale and have record of the return and from there it’s up to you if the product is going back tot he vendor or being resold at a discount.

If you receive an item off of a purchase order, and want it to be reflected as “returned to vendor“, you have a number of options.

  1. Negative receive the particular item on the purchase order. This might be used when you made a receiving mistake.
  2. Add the item to the purchase order with a negative quantity as a new line and then receive this negative item. This might be done when you want to track that the item was received and you were returning it for some reason (like damage).
  3. Create a new PO with some identifier like RTV- in front of the PO to identify it as a return to vendor and put the item(s) on with negative quantities that are going back to the vendor. This can make it easier to track returns to vendor and also with some integrations to open to buy systems like Management One are necessary to track this properly in their program.

Remember in all cases you need to receive and update the negative quantities to make sure that the adjustments to inventory, the receiving history and the purchase order.

Negative adjustments with purchase orders can also be used for other reasons like losses and shrinkage. In this case it is better to create a new Purchase Order and have the purchase order setup with your store as the vendor. This will make sure that the receiving history for the vendor accurately reflects that the receiving from them occurred but that you incurred the loss.

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