Introduction
Silo's repacking workflow allows you to select multiple inputs to create multiple outputs. It also supports two methods to distribute costs, expenses, revenue, and inventory counts (O/H, waste, sold, etc.). The goal of this article is to provide general guidance on when to use multiple input or output lots and which distribution method to use when creating a repack.
Distribution Method
As described in Guide to Repack Math, you can choose to distribute your costs, expenses, revenue, and inventory counts by unit or by weight.
Generally, you should distribute by unit if all inputs and outputs are like products in terms of type and weight. If you plan on using packaging as an input, or if you have output lots with varying weights, we highly recommend instead distributing by weight for the following reasons:
- If output lots have different weights, the ones that weigh more are usually worth more. Distributing by unit treats all inputs equally, whereas distribute by weight allocates costs based on how much something weighs.
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When distributing by unit, some of the revenue and expenses would be distributed back to any packaging material used as input, which means the raw material inputs would get less. For users who share liquidation reports with their suppliers, this means that their commission could be skewed because the resulting inaccurate revenue numbers for the raw materials.
When to Use Multiple Input or Output Lots
We recommend that you record one repack in Silo for each actual repack you physically perform, rather than using multiple inputs and outputs to document multiple separate physical repacks. It is not advisable to combine multiple physical repacks into one repack in Silo for the following reasons:
- Traceability: Combining multiple repacks into one in Silo means that you will lose the ability to separate the repack into what was actually in a given physical repack.
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Performance metrics: Sales of output lots are re-attributed back to the input lots. For those who share liquidation reports, this would result in less accurate calculations.
Pallet Tracking
If you want each output lot to represent one pallet's worth of quantity, there are a few ways to handle this:
- Add multiple of the same output item
- Add one output item, set the quantity to the entire quantity created by the repack, and use the Split into pallets link to split the output into 1-pallet increments.
Either of these options can be used for repacks created from scratch and repacks created from templates. If you are using repack templates and want to be able to take advantage of linked item quantities, the second approach is recommended—this way you can create the template with a single output item, enter the appropriate input quantities on the repack to automatically calculate the output units created, and then split the output item as needed.
Once you've finished creating the repack, you can also print pallet labels for all of your output lots directly from the repack window.
For more information about repack templates and linked item quantities, see the following article:
Guardrails
We have a few guardrails in place to minimize errors in repacking, as well as some practical limitations. They are as follows:
- You cannot create organic output lots if there are non-organic input lots.
- You cannot repack input lots from multiple locations. In the input search, we hide lots from different locations that the first selected input lot.
- We do not allow you to use items with 0 available quantity as repack inputs.
- We do not allow you to use inactive inventory items as repack inputs.
- We do not allow you to use cascaded inventory items in repacks.