Returned Goods Disposition Workflow

The problem this kills

Returns pile up in a corner of the warehouse undecided. Is this one good enough to put back on the shelf? Does it need a quick refurb? Is it junk? Nobody wants to make the call alone, because guessing wrong costs money either way - restock a damaged item and a customer gets burned, or scrap a perfectly good unit and you've thrown away inventory. So the boxes sit. Cash sits with them.

Meanwhile the decisions that do get made happen on sticky notes and in someone's head. There's no record of who decided what, no consistent grading, and no way to see the financial impact until month-end when the numbers look off.

This tool ends the pile-up. Every received return gets graded against rules you define, gets a recommended disposition, and waits for one approver to say yes - and only then does any inventory or cost action happen.

What you'll build

A small web app your returns, warehouse, and quality team logs into. For each received return they record the condition; the tool recommends a disposition (restock, refurbish, or scrap) based on your own grading rules and your own restock-vs-scrap value thresholds. The recommendation goes into an approval queue. The disposition approver reviews it, approves or overrides, and the moment they approve, the system writes a clean inventory and cost-impact log entry - and can export a file in the exact columns your warehouse or ERP system expects.

Nothing touches your real inventory or your books until a person has approved it.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• A guided build you run by pasting one file into Claude Code - no prior coding needed.
• It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it builds anything, the plan has the AI ask you about your returns process, your condition grades, your value thresholds, your RMA and SKU naming, and your messy edge cases - then it tailors the data model and rules to you instead of dropping a generic template on you.
• Step-by-step build prompts you copy and paste, each one ready to go.
• A condition-grading model and a disposition recommendation engine wired to your thresholds.
• A human approval queue with override-and-reason.
• An inventory and cost-impact log on every approved decision.
• A login, per-organization data isolation, a full audit trail, and duplicate guards keyed on RMA + item.
• A "No API yet?" fallback: import returns from a Google Sheet or CSV and export approved dispositions as a clean CSV.

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 returns.
• A complete audit trail - who graded, who recommended, who approved or overrode, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the AI recommends a disposition, but nothing is written to inventory or cost records until the approver signs off.
• Duplicate guards - the same RMA + item can't be processed twice.

Who it's for

Returns and warehouse teams, reverse-logistics coordinators, and quality reviewers who are drowning in undecided returns and need a consistent, auditable way to grade, decide, and act - without waiting on an ERP integration to get started.

You've got this. Paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the rest.