Notifying CHEP and Loscam of transfers off your account is a critical function. The number of days between the movement and when it is notified to CHEP is one of the measures they apply. Timely notification can be even more important when you come to the end of your financial budget period, e.g. your finance team may not want a new budget period to be hit with transfers which should have been invoiced in the previous budget period.
CHEP allow 180 days to notify them of a transfer and Loscam 2 months. Some trading partners do have different rules to these.
Most hirers only notify transfers off their accounts. Transfer ons are not normally notified to the pallet hire companies for the following reasons:
- Whilst the CHEP system does not normally allow docket number duplications, the Loscam system does. If the sender and receiver both notified Loscam of a transfer then it could end up being invoiced twice.
- It is possible that receiving staff could make an error. It has been known for truck drivers to provide pallet transfer dockets to receiving staff even though some of the transfers did not relate to any deliveries made to the site. This is not usually a deliberate malicious act by the driver but rather poor documentation management.If these incorrect transfers were notified to the pallet hire companies then they would generate pallet losses as the pallets were never received.
- If the sender fails to notify the pallet hire companies then the receiver stands to gain.
Online Systems
If you use an online system like CHEP Portfolio or Loscam Online then the notification of the transfer is virtually immediate. The disadvantage of this is that you cannot edit the docket once it has been submitted. You can only raise a correction or rejection. This can be a nuisance if you find that the number of pallets or the delivery date needs to be changed.
The PalletWatch system is also an onlne system but it has the functionality to delay notification to the pallet hire companies. It lets you delay the notification by a preferred number of days, e.g. 2 days from the movement date. PalletWatch also has an automatic export capability which means that you don’t have to worry about exporting the transfer off data.
Master/Slave Systems
A master/slave system is one where one site has a master data file and there can be other sites which have “slave” data files used mainly for data entry. Periodically this data needs to be emailed to the master data file so that it can be used for reconciling and notification purposes.
If you use a master/slave system then notification to pallet hire companies can become a problem. Apart from having to manually import from a slave site to the master data file you then have to manually export the data to the pallet hire companies.
This cumbersome method can mean that notification to CHEP and Loscam can take longer and be more problematic than if you use one of the online systems mentioned above.