Returnable Asset (Pallet/Tote) Tracker

The problem this kills

You loan out pallets, totes, kegs, or reels every week. They go out the door fast and come back slowly - if they come back at all. Somewhere between the loading dock, the delivery driver, and the customer's back room, the count drifts. A spreadsheet that "mostly works" hides the truth: by the time you total it up at year-end, you're down hundreds of assets and nobody can say who has them.

Replacement costs balloon quietly. You can't bill a customer for unreturned assets because you can't prove what you issued versus what came back. Deposits sit on a sticky note. And the one person who "just knows" the balances is on vacation.

This tool turns that mess into a clean, defensible ledger: every issue and every return logged per customer, a running balance you can trust, and a deposit accounting trail you can actually invoice against.

What you'll build

A small internal web app your dock and accounts teams log into. They record each asset issue and return event against a customer. The tool keeps a live running balance per customer per asset type, ages the outstanding count, and raises a flag when an account goes overdue or comes back short.

When it's time to recover costs, the tool drafts a reconciliation and a chargeback amount - but it never commits anything on its own. Your manager reviews the draft, adjusts if needed, and approves. Only then does the balance adjustment and chargeback land in the recovery log, and a balance statement goes out to the customer by email.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a full, paste-and-go runbook for an AI coding agent (Claude Code). You don't write code - you paste, answer questions, and approve.

It opens by interviewing you about your actual business - your asset types and their unit values, how you name customers and assets, your deposit and aging rules, your typical and peak issue volumes, and your messy edge cases (split deliveries, broken returns, third-party haulers). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up, so what gets built fits your operation - not a generic template.

From there it walks you step by step: the data model shaped to your answers, the issue/return logging screens, the running-balance and deposit ledger, the overdue/short aging flags, the manager approval gate for reconciliations and chargebacks, balance statements by email, and a CSV import/export fallback so you can run it today even without an ERP integration.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can use the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own customers, assets, and balances.
• A complete audit trail - who logged which event, who approved which chargeback, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate before any balance reconciliation or chargeback is committed: the tool drafts, your manager reviews and approves, and only then is it written to the recovery log.
• Duplicate guards so the same issue or return event can't be recorded twice (dedupe key = customer + asset + event).

Who it's for

Logistics and asset managers, reverse-logistics coordinators, and customer-accounts teams at any operation that loans returnable assets - distributors, breweries, food and produce shippers, manufacturers, and 3PLs. If "where did all the pallets go" is a recurring conversation, this is for you.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.