Unpacking the Thursday box
The livestock box arrives just after opening on Thursday. Inside are dozens of bags: tetras, corydoras, a few shrimp, some plecos and a couple of marine fish. Your aquatics manager starts acclimatising the bags while the phone rings and a customer waits for a water test. Two bags have losses on arrival. She scribbles on the delivery note and throws the dead fish away, meaning to take photos but forgetting in the rush.
Over the next two days, a few more fish from the same delivery are lost. The supplier's terms, somewhere in an email from years ago, allow claims for arrival losses reported within a short window, with photos. Nobody reports anything. When the invoice arrives, it is paid in full.
Why claims do not get made
Livestock deliveries need hands-on attention at exactly the moment the shop is busiest. The claim process needs evidence and timing that are hard to capture while you are focused on getting animals settled.
- Supplier claim rules and deadlines differ and are not written down in one place.
- Photos are not taken, or are on a personal phone and never sent.
- Losses in the first days are not linked back to the delivery they came from.
- The person unpacking is not the person paying invoices.
- Nobody checks whether credit notes promised ever arrive.
What unclaimed losses cost
Every unclaimed loss is money paid for stock you could not sell, and livestock is often one of your higher margin areas. Without records, you cannot compare suppliers or boxes, so a supplier with consistently worse arrivals keeps getting orders.
The admin side adds up quietly. Each unclaimed box is a small amount, easy to shrug off on a busy Thursday, but livestock arrives week after week, and nobody ever adds the losses together to see what they amount to over a year.
It also hides patterns worth knowing, such as whether losses are higher from a particular route, day or time of year, which could change how and when you order. What you do with that information is a matter for your own experience and advisers; the point is that you cannot act on what you never record.
An arrival check and claims tracker
- When a delivery arrives, staff open it on a tablet or phone, with the supplier's invoice or order list loaded as the expected contents.
- Each line is counted as received, with losses on arrival recorded and a photo taken in the app, time stamped.
- Each supplier's claim rules, such as reporting window, evidence needed and how to submit, are stored and shown at arrival.
- Losses in the days after arrival are recorded against the same delivery from the livestock record, and flagged if they fall within the supplier's window.
- The app prepares the claim with photos and counts, ready to send by email or the supplier's portal, and records when it was sent.
- Claims are tracked until a credit note arrives, and matched against the supplier's invoices in Xero, QuickBooks or Sage.
| Step | Today | With the tracker |
|---|---|---|
| Arrival losses | Scribbled on the delivery note | Counted and photographed |
| Supplier rules | Remembered, or not | Shown at arrival |
| Early losses | Not linked to delivery | Linked and flagged |
| Claim | Rarely sent | Prepared with evidence |
| Credit note | Not checked | Matched to invoice |
The claims follow each supplier's own terms. We do not make judgements about the cause of any loss, which stays with you and the supplier.
Deliveries that leave a trail
Unpacking takes about as long as before, but the counts and photos are captured as you go, on the device already in your hand. If losses fall within a supplier's terms, the claim is ready to send before the end of the day, and the office sees it waiting for a credit note.
Over months, the tracker shows arrival losses and claims by supplier, which gives your buying decisions a factual basis instead of a feeling about who sends the best fish.
Are your livestock losses going unclaimed?
- Losses on arrival are noted on paper, if at all.
- Photos for claims are rarely taken or sent.
- You are not sure of each supplier's claim deadline.
- Credit notes are not matched to invoices.
- You cannot compare arrival losses between suppliers.