Empty jar tracking: how to stop losing jars

A 20-litre jar is a real asset. It costs money to buy, it has to be washed and refilled, and it has to come back. Every jar that stays at a customer’s home, drifts to another shop, or gets sold as scrap is cash gone from your business. Jar losses rarely show up as one big event. They show up as a few jars a week that nobody can explain.

This guide explains why empties go missing and gives you a method that works with a notebook, and works better with a proper record.

Why empties go missing

Look for these patterns in your own routes.

• Nobody counts at the door. The driver puts down three full jars and picks up whatever empties are outside. Nobody writes the number. At night the count is a guess.
• Delivered and returned are mixed together. One number on the slip, “3”, could mean three delivered or three exchanged. Later you cannot tell which.
• Skipped stops lose their empties. The customer was not home but had left two empties outside. The driver took them, wrote “skipped”, and the two empties are never recorded.
• Customers build up a stock. A household holds five jars while using one a day. A shop keeps spares. Over months, a customer can hold ten extra jars without anyone deciding that.
• Jars move between customers. A jar from one customer ends up with a neighbour. When someone returns a jar that is not “theirs”, the record gets confusing.
• Driver changes. When a relief driver covers a route, the habits of the regular driver do not transfer.

None of these need dishonesty. They need missing counts, and counts are cheap to fix.

The count-at-the-door method

The rule is simple. At every stop, the driver records two separate numbers before leaving.

1. Jars delivered. Full jars put down.
2. Empties taken back. Empty jars picked up.

Keep them as separate numbers, never one. Then the stop makes sense on its own:

• Delivered 3, empties 3 means a straight exchange. The customer’s holding is unchanged.
• Delivered 3, empties 1 means the customer now holds 2 more jars than before.
• Delivered 0, empties 2 means the customer returned two jars and took none.

Tell drivers to count aloud with the customer at the door when possible. It takes ten seconds and ends most arguments later. If the customer is not home and empties are outside, the driver still records them, and records the stop as skipped with a reason.

Bottle balance per route per day

The bottle balance answers one question for each route each day: do the jars add up?

There are two checks. The first is on the vehicle: full jars loaded minus jars delivered should equal the full jars left on board. The second is on the stops: jars delivered minus empties taken back is the bottle balance for the run. A positive balance means customers now hold more of your jars than this morning.

A practical way to keep it:

• Morning: full jars loaded, and any empties already on the vehicle.
• During the day: jars delivered and empties collected, stop by stop.
• Night: full jars still on the vehicle, and empties on the vehicle.

If you loaded 60 full jars and delivered 54, there should be 6 full jars on board. If you delivered 54 and collected 50 empties, the balance is 4. The question is whether those 4 are explained by named stops where customers kept extra jars.

Reconcile at the close of the day

Do this the same evening, before the driver goes home, while he still remembers the stops.

1. Count what is on the vehicle. Full jars left and empties collected.
2. Compare with the stop records. Do loaded minus delivered and the full jars on board match?
3. List the gap. If empties collected are fewer than jars delivered, write which stops account for it.
4. Resolve unexplained jars today. A one-jar gap on day one is easy to chase. A forty-jar gap at month-end is a mystery.
5. Lock the day. Once checked, the record should not be edited casually. If something must be corrected, the office does it and notes why.

Ten minutes per route is a fair target. If it takes much longer, the stop records are the problem, not the reconciliation.

Customers holding extra jars

A customer holding more jars than they use is a normal result of the exchange process. Handle it without drama.

• Know the number. For each customer, work out jars delivered minus empties returned over time. Look at the ones with the largest positive figure.
• Ask first. Many customers do not realise they hold extras. “We show you have eight of our jars, and you take two a week. Shall we collect four?” is polite and specific.
• Match holding to usage. A rule of thumb you can set is that a customer should hold about one or two deliveries’ worth. This is your call, not a standard.
• Collect on the next visit. Ask the driver to pick up the surplus when he is delivering anyway.
• Agree a policy for loss. If a customer cannot return jars, decide what you charge and tell them in writing.

Example

This is an illustrative example with made-up round numbers. It is not a result or an average.

Route 2 loads the full jars it needs each morning. Over a week, the counts look like this.

The week ends 17 empties short. Without a record, 17 jars simply vanish. With the record, the office sees that Wednesday and Saturday carry 14 of the 17. A look at those two days shows that one new shop took 12 jars across them and has returned none yet. That shop is holding stock, which the office can agree on or reduce. The remaining 3 are small gaps from Monday and Thursday, which the driver traces to stops where customers had not put their empties out. The office asks the shop for a plan and checks those stops next week.

The point of the example is the method. A daily gap total tells you whether something is wrong. The stop-level record tells you where.

What to do weekly

• Add up empties gap per route for the week.
• List the ten customers holding the most jars beyond their usage.
• Ask each driver about repeated gaps on the same stops.
• Check the weekly gap against last week. A rising gap with no new customers needs attention.

To see how much this costs you, enter your own figures into the empties loss calculator. The calculator uses numbers you supply, nothing else.

How Pyaau helps

Pyaau is an Android app for jar delivery businesses. For empties, today it does the following:

• The driver sets jars delivered and empties taken back on each stop. A one-tap “Match” sets empties equal to delivered.
• Short and extra show on the stop, for example -1 or +2.
• A skipped stop needs a reason, and empties collected on a skipped stop are kept.
• Each run has a bottle balance, and the close-of-day summary shows delivered, skipped, extras, empties, bottle balance and short jars. “Lock Run” closes the day.
• A short-and-extra report by customer or route over any dates lets you see the stops behind each row.
• Pyaau keeps a count of jars held per customer and per product, for products you mark as coming back as empties. It updates on every delivery and shows on the customer page. When you add a customer, you can enter the jars they already hold.
• If the empties entered on a stop are more than the customer holds, the app shows a warning. It warns and still saves, so the driver is never blocked at the door.

For a wider look at the method, see what to record on every jar delivery.