Returns & Recovery

Three questions that returns dashboards usually blur into one. What is still open in the reverse flow, as of now — authorized but not received, received but not inspected, inspected but not dispositioned. What came back out of the material that actually settled — as usable quantity, and separately as money. And what a claim about preventing the next return would need to rest on.

The pattern refuses three shortcuts. An authorization is not a receipt: a customer being told they may return something is not material arriving. A credit is not a recovery: money settled with a customer is a liability discharged, not inventory value regained. And a reason code is not a cause: it records how somebody classified a return, which is an input to an investigation rather than a conclusion of one.

1. 1Context — four independent pins. The business as-of and the capture cutoff decide what exists and what is known; the completed-cycle window is separate and applies only to the historical views, which say so rather than showing a control that changes nothing.
2. 2Measure row — recovered quantity and net financial recovery are different measures in different units, and neither is the credit issued to the customer.
3. 3Worklist — a current-snapshot list, aged from authorization and scored against the authored disposition due instant. It is not a completed-cycle measure, and a line recorded as closed or cancelled while material is still here stays on it as an exception rather than leaving the view.
4. 4Conservation — one bar per unit of measure, and the segments sum exactly to what was received. A repeated inspection does not add material.
5. 5Financial — value and cost stay separate with their own evidence, the net is labelled partial, and completeness is counted against the physical actions that declare the currency.
6. 6Reasons — two codings side by side, never merged, and a preventive claim only where an owned investigation with evidence exists.

The accumulating fact is the authorization line as it moves: authorized, received, inspected, dispositioned, settled. Everything that could otherwise overwrite an earlier state is a separate append-only row instead — a revision for a cancellation, a reopen, a quantity change or a reason change; a signed correction event for a miscounted receipt; a numbered attempt for a re-inspection; a reversal for an action taken in error.

Two instants travel with every row. The business instant says when it happened; the capture instant says when the warehouse learned about it. Pinning them separately is what lets a replay answer “what did the room know on the second, about the flow as it stood on the tenth” without a late-captured receipt silently appearing in an earlier reading, and without a future receipt leaking into a current one.

A fact that spans time captures more than once. An inspection attempt records when it started and, separately, when its completion was learned of — because knowing an attempt began is not knowing how it ended. Until the completion is captured, the attempt is open: it contributes no inspected quantity, no outcome and no assessed reason, rather than being credited with a result the review cannot yet see. The same discipline applies to every derived population: an investigation recorded after the capture cutoff reaches no tile, no card and no reason row.

Quantities carry the line’s unit of measure and money carries its own currency. Both are exact decimal strings at a declared scale and are summed as scaled integers, so a conservation ladder closes to zero rather than to a rounding residue. Nothing is converted between units or currencies anywhere in the model.

The conservation rule is the one that has to hold before any yield means anything: inside a single unit of measure, received quantity equals the quantity still awaiting inspection, plus the quantity inspected and awaiting a disposition, plus the quantity that reached a supported final disposition. Only the first inspection attempt against a receipt event contributes distinct inspected quantity, which is what stops a second or third look at the same units from inflating the ladder. Interim rework and quarantine holds are counted and shown as attempt volume, and deliberately do not enter the identity.

Recovery yield needs its denominator declared, because two defensible ones give very different numbers. The settled basis divides restocked quantity by what has actually reached a final disposition. The received basis divides it by everything received, which is lower by construction while material is still pending — so the pending share is published beside it rather than left for the reader to infer. When nothing has settled, the settled yield is unavailable; it is not reported as zero.

A zero that was measured and a value that is missing are different states throughout. A line that settled with nothing restocked has a recovered quantity of zero. A line with no final disposition yet has no recovered quantity at all, and says so.

Money is measured the same way, and the trap there is the denominator. Counting only the actions that happen to carry a money row makes a missing record invisible: delete an action’s only cost and it leaves the population it was supposed to be measured against, so the figure improves. The settlement currency is therefore declared on the physical action, and the eligible population for a currency is the actions that declare it. What comes out is a partial supported net — evidenced value less evidenced cost — beside the count of eligible actions that recorded no money at all. An action with no declared currency cannot be attributed to either side and is reported as its own gap.

A lifecycle state is a record, not a settlement. Marking a line closed or cancelled is an administrative act and cannot dispose of material, so a line whose recorded state says the case is over while units are still pending inspection or awaiting a disposition stays in the operational worklist as an exception, with the quantity it still holds. A cancellation raised after material had arrived is reported separately from one raised before anything was ever sent back.

• Reject duplicate authorization, line, revision, receipt, inspection, action, component and settlement identities, and reject a revision sequence whose numbering disagrees with its effective instants — that is an ambiguous revision, not a tie to break.
• Compare instants, never date text, and require a capture instant at or after the business instant it records. Give a fact that spans time a capture instant per stage, and derive every population — including reason and investigation joins — from the same cutoff-aware set the detail views read.
• Attribute a settlement correction to what it corrects: the same authorization, the same allocated line and the same currency, targeting a credit or a refund rather than another correction, issued and captured after it, and never taking back more in total than that document settled.
• Format exact decimals as strings. Grouping an integer identity through a floating-point number silently rounds anything past the mantissa, and plot geometry needs a checked conversion with an explicit unavailable state rather than a bar drawn to a rounded value.
• Keep the open worklist on the current as-of and completed cycle-time on the declared start, end and eligible closed population. A line still carrying pending or awaiting quantity is censored out of cycle time and counted, never treated as fast.
• Keep reported and assessed reason coding in separate fields for the life of the line. Publish agreement and disagreement counts; never overwrite one with the other, and never fold an absent reason into a residual code.
• Attach an owner to every action, and require an owner, evidence and at least one examined case before anything on the page reads as a preventive finding.
• Store recovery value and each cost class as separate evidenced components. Exclude unevidenced components from the net and report both the excluded amount and the actions that recorded no cost at all.
• Do not derive an environmental or revenue-impact claim from a disposition type. Recycling a unit is an action; an emissions statement additionally needs activity data, factors, a declared boundary and an allocation rule, none of which this contract carries.
• Source availability stays outside this pattern. Which system holds these facts, and whether it holds them at this grain, is an adapter question that needs a named product, version and extraction path before it can be answered.