How To Efficiently Return Parts

One of the things I’ve seen working with clients is that sometimes there’s not an efficient way of returning parts. I’m going to give you an example. A shop orders a steering rack and power steering rack, the cost is $260, and the technician opens up the box and finds the part was damaged through shipping. So the technician packages the steering rack up, puts it on the shelf for return, and it goes back to the parts company. Yet instead of getting the full amount of $260, they get a $30 core return, and they lose $230.

So what I recommend to do is to have an effective and efficient process where number one, there’s somebody in charge at the shop to write those returns up so you don’t have to rely on the parts house to do this for you. Number two is the return slip that’s written up for the returns has to be held in a holding file, not filed away yet, because what you want to do is wait for the return slip to come back. The credits have to come back from the parts company, and those two have to match up.

Then at that point, once everything matches up, that parts slip gets filed away, and is filed when there are no mistakes. If you do this, you’re going to catch mistakes. Again, it’s not done intentionally, mistakes are made by accident.