The Exit With Nobody on the Other Side
Every other way stock leaves your business has somebody on the other side of it — a customer, a project, a destination branch. A write-off has nobody. It is the one exit where the only evidence is whatever the person doing it chose to attach, and in our system attaching anything is optional.
Make a list of the ways stock leaves a warehouse and something becomes obvious about one of them.
- A sale leaves with a customer, an invoice and money arriving later.
- An issue to a job leaves with a project that will be costed and eventually reviewed.
- A transfer leaves for another location that is expected to receive it and will notice if it does not.
- A return to supplier would leave against an order somebody is chasing a credit for — except that there is no return-to-supplier path in this product at all, so in practice rejected goods become a write-off too. That is argued separately in the goods you cannot send back.
- A write-off leaves with nobody. There is no counterparty, no document arriving later, and nothing downstream that fails if it never happened.
That last one is not a minor category. Damage, expiry, breakage, loss in transit and shrinkage all land there, and for most businesses it is the only route by which stock can disappear without something else in the system noticing.
Every other exit is checked by the person on the other end. The write-off is checked by whatever the writer chose to attach.
What we do control, and it is more than you might expect
It would be unfair to present adjustments as a hole in the product, because a real amount of work has gone into them and most of it is good.
An adjustment is raised and then approved, and those can be different people. Above a value you set, the approver needs a specific permission that is separate from ordinary approval — and, importantly, cannot be the person who raised it, which is a separation of duties that no permission grant can override. The value is computed on absolute terms, so an adjustment that moves stock out and back cannot net to zero and slip under the line. Every step is audited.
So the authorisation side is sound. The evidence side is where it stops.
The field that is always optional
An adjustment can carry a document. It has always been able to, and the mechanism works — you can attach a photograph of the damaged pallet, the transporter's report, the disposal note. Signatures can be captured on it too.
None of it can ever be required. There is no setting that says a write-off above a certain value must carry a document, and no rule that ties a particular reason — damage, theft, loss in transit — to a particular kind of evidence. The attachment is available on every adjustment and compulsory on none, which means whether your write-offs are evidenced is a question about your people rather than about your system.
For a lot of organizations that is genuinely fine. For the ones where it is not, the failure is quiet: nothing is refused, nothing is flagged, and the adjustment goes through approval looking exactly like a well-documented one, because at the moment of approval the approver is looking at a quantity and a reason, not at an absence.
An approver cannot notice a missing document. They can only notice a present one.
How strongly each part of a write-off is controlled
Who may raise one
Permission-gated, and separable from who may approve.
Who may approve a large one
A distinct permission above a value threshold you set.
That approver is not the raiser
Enforced above the threshold and not overridable by any grant. The strongest control here.
That the value cannot be gamed to duck the threshold
Measured on absolute movement, so out-and-back does not net to nothing.
That a reason is recorded
Chosen from a list you maintain, which is better than free text and weaker than a controlled vocabulary.
That evidence is attached
Possible on every adjustment, required on none. This is the subject of this post.
That evidence matches the reason given
Not modelled at all — no reason carries an expectation of any particular document.
The shape here is worth reading as a whole. Authorisation is strong and documentation is absent, which produces write-offs that are properly approved and unexplainable a year later.
Why distance is what makes this expensive
In one building, evidence is less important than it looks, because the approver has other sources. They can walk to the rack. They know the storekeeper. They saw the pallet arrive damaged, or they can ask three people who did.
Now put the goods on a corridor — freight moving inland over days across borders, sites that head office reaches rarely, and a manager approving a write-off from several hundred kilometres away. Everything that substituted for evidence in the first case is gone. The approver has the quantity, the reason code, and the name of the person who raised it, and nothing else. They are not approving an event; they are approving a description of one.
In that situation the attached photograph is not paperwork. It is the entire difference between a write-off that can be reviewed and one that can only be believed. And it is the field the system treats as optional.
What to do while it is optional
Make the requirement procedural and make it visible at approval rather than after it. The practical version: agree which reasons require a document, put that in writing, and have approvers refuse anything that arrives without one. The refusal has to be the habit, because the system will not do it — and an approver who lets three through has established that the rule is advisory.
It is also worth reviewing write-offs by reason periodically, since the reason list is yours to maintain. A reason that is being used far more than the others is telling you something, whether or not any individual use of it was wrong.
Three, and the cheapest one is the one we would ship first
The attachment mechanism, the approval flow and the value threshold all exist. What is missing is the ability to make them relate to each other.
Show the absence at approval
A visible marker on any adjustment arriving for approval with nothing attached. It requires no new data and changes no rules — it just makes an approver see what they cannot currently see. We would ship this before either of the others.
Evidence required above a threshold, and per reason
A rule that a write-off above a value, or under a particular reason, cannot be approved without a document. The threshold machinery already exists for the permission check; this reuses it for a different condition.
An evidence completeness report
Write-offs by reason, by site and by whether anything was attached. This is what turns a procedure into something you can audit, and it is the one that would tell you whether the first two were needed.
We would resist making evidence mandatory everywhere by default. A correction of a counting error does not need a photograph, and a control that fires on everything trains people to satisfy it with anything.
Talk to us about write-off controlsFour questions about write-off control
Can you make a document compulsory above a value?
What a straight answer sounds like
A setting, or a no. Ours is a no.
Why it matters
Optional evidence means the quality of your write-off records is a property of your staff rather than your system.
Can different reasons demand different evidence?
What a straight answer sounds like
Almost certainly no. Ask anyway.
Why it matters
Theft and a unit-of-measure correction are not the same event and should not clear the same bar.
At approval, does the screen show me that nothing is attached?
What a straight answer sounds like
A demonstration on an empty adjustment.
Why it matters
Absence is invisible unless something draws it. This is the cheapest fix on the list and almost nobody has it.
Which write-offs last year carried no evidence at all?
What a straight answer sounds like
A report. Ours cannot produce one.
Why it matters
If you cannot ask the question afterwards, you cannot know whether your procedure is being followed.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Approval separate from creation, with permissions that can be held by different people.
- A value threshold above which a distinct permission is required, set per organization.
- Separation of duties above that threshold — the approver cannot be the person who raised it, and no permission grant overrides this.
- Value measured on absolute movement, so an adjustment cannot be structured to net under the threshold.
- Attachments and signatures supported on every adjustment, and served securely.
- A maintained reason list, so write-offs are categorised rather than described in free text.
What it does not do
- Evidence can never be made compulsory. No setting, no rule, no threshold makes an attachment required.
- No reason-specific evidence requirement, so damage and theft demand the same documentation as a rounding correction, which is none.
- No flag at approval that a write-off is undocumented, so an approver cannot see the absence they are approving.
- No second threshold, so one number governs every reason, warehouse and item class.
- No review of evidence completeness after the fact — you cannot ask which write-offs last year carried nothing.
Not ours, by choice
- Nothing in this post is a claim about any region, market or customer being more prone to loss. The argument is structural: this is the one stock exit with no counterparty, and that is true in every country including the ones we work in daily.
- We publish no customs or transit procedure for this region. The regional argument here is distance, not regulation.
The verdict
The authorisation around write-offs in this product is genuinely strong — separated duties that cannot be granted away, a value threshold that cannot be gamed by structuring, and a full audit trail. What it produces is a write-off that was correctly approved and cannot be explained afterwards, because the one field that would explain it is the one field nothing requires. If your sites are close enough that approvers have other ways of knowing, this costs you little. If you are approving losses on a corridor you cannot see, treat the attachment as mandatory in your procedure today, and ask us to show you the marker at approval — because until it exists, an approver genuinely cannot tell a documented write-off from an undocumented one.
Tell us where your stock actually goes missing
On the road, at the branch, or in the count. We will show you which controls apply at each point today, which depend on your procedure rather than our software, and what we would change first for the way you operate.
Talk to us about stock losses