Shipping material accounting

Organizations that use reusable packaging materials to ship goods to their customers often outsource ownership, management, handling, and distribution of those materials to third parties.

The owners of the packaging materials can be your own organization or a third party, such as a Packaging Service Provider (PSP). The owners of packaging materials can charge a fee from their business partners for the use of the packaging materials.

For example, if you are a supplier, a customer or a PSP can be the owner of the packaging materials and be responsible for their maintenance and timely supply.

To communicate with your business partners about quantities of packaging items, and payments, you must keep track of the inbound and outbound transactions of the packaging materials for each business partner.

For this purpose, you must implement packaging item registration to record inbound and outbound packaging item transactions and define shipping material accounts to link the transactions to a business partner or group of business partners.

You can view and maintain packaging item transactions in the Packaging Item Transactions (whinr1115m000) session. Shipping material accounts are maintained in the Shipping Material Accounts (whwmd4170m000) session.

Balances of packaging items present in your own warehouse and at the business partners are recorded, based on the issue and receipt transactions of packaging materials for each shipping material account.

Optionally, you can maintain the circulating quantity of packaging items. This is the aggregated quantity present at the business partner and your own warehouse.

You can view and maintain the packaging item balances in the Packaging Item Balances by Shipping Material Account (whwmd4175m000) session.

If an external business partner such as a PSP owns the packaging materials, you can create a dedicated shipping material account for this business partner. In this account, you can specify that both the packaging material transactions between your organization and the PSP and those between your organization and your customers or suppliers are recorded.

Also, you can view the PSP's packing materials transaction records and, if required, reconcile them with your own. You can view and maintain the PSP's transaction records in the External Packaging Item Transactions (whinr1116m000) session. The external business partner's transaction records are communicated through the external application Automotive Exchange Export Manager (EXM).

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