Return-to-Vendor (RTV) Coordinator

The problem this kills

Defective, recalled, and overstock items pile up in a corner of the warehouse waiting to go back to the vendor - and the money owed back to you goes with them. Someone emails a vendor for a return authorization, prints a label, ships the box, and then... nothing. No one tracks whether the credit memo ever showed up. Expected credit and received credit drift apart, shortfalls go unchased, and the recovery dollars quietly evaporate.

It usually lives in a tangle of spreadsheets, sticky notes, and inbox threads. There's no single place that says: here's everything flagged for RTV, here's how it's grouped by vendor, here's the RA number, here's who approved it, and here's the credit we're still owed.

What you'll build

A simple, login-protected web app - built for your business, by you, with an AI coding agent - that runs the whole return-to-vendor cycle end to end:

• Pull in items flagged for RTV from a CSV or Google Sheet (item code, quantity, reason, unit cost).
• Automatically group flagged items by vendor and total up the expected credit.
• Capture the vendor's RA number (return authorization - the vendor's permission-to-return reference).
• Send the batch to a purchasing lead, who reviews and approves the expected credit before anything ships.
• On approval, generate an RTV shipment document, remove the returned quantity from sellable on-hand, and start an expected-credit log.
• Email the vendor automatically, and export a clean CSV in the exact columns your system of record expects.
• Later, record the credit you actually received and instantly see any shortfall to chase.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code). It builds the whole tool with you, step by step, in plain language.

• It starts by interviewing you about your business. Before writing a line of code, the plan has the agent ask about your current returns process, the systems and spreadsheets you use, your real field names and SKU conventions, your typical and peak return volumes, your approval rules, and your messy edge cases. It reads back a short tailored spec and waits for your thumbs-up - so you get a tool shaped to how you work, not a generic template.
• A ready-to-use data model for RTV items, vendor batches, and the credit log - adapted to your answers.
• The vendor-grouping and expected-credit math.
• The purchasing-lead approval gate, the audit trail, and the duplicate guard.
• The shipment document, the automatic vendor email, and the CSV export.
• A "No API yet?" fallback so you can build and run the whole thing today from a spreadsheet, with no integration to your ERP required.
• Copy-paste prompts at every step and a final checklist to confirm it all works.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan bakes in the controls a real returns process needs:

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so each user only ever sees their own organization's data.
• A complete audit trail - who flagged, who approved, who edited, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the tool drafts the RTV batch and expected credit, a purchasing lead reviews and approves, and only then is the shipment created and the vendor notified. Nothing hits your system of record without a person saying yes.
• Duplicate guards so the same item can't be added to the same RTV batch twice.

Who it's for

Inventory control, purchasing, and returns coordinators who are tired of watching vendor credits go uncollected - and who want a real internal tool without hiring a developer. If you can fill in a spreadsheet and answer questions about how your returns work, you can build this.

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