3 Features Your RMA Solution Should Have (Part 1): Flexibility

I’ve already talked in general about why RMAs are amazing, and now I’m going to delve deeper into what makes them so useful to a business. Specifically, what should your RMA solution be able to do in order to make the return process simpler for your customers? I’m going to talk about three features that RMA solutions should possess. They should be:

• Flexible enough to handle a variety of needs
• Integrated with inventory management software
• Able to generate detailed reports to shed light on customer behavior

I’ll also talk about how Fishbowl Manufacturing and Fishbowl Warehouse provide each of these features. Let’s talk about the first one on this list: Flexibility.

Flexible RMAs

Your RMA should allow you to access your customer’s original order information, which will help in refunding their purchase price. But not every RMA deals with returns. They may also be a replacement, substitution, or repair job. Fishbowl can create RMAs to handle all of these scenarios. You can even cross ship items to get replacement, substitute, and repaired products to customers faster.

Warranty

If you offer warranties on products, you definitely need to keep track of when those warranties are in force and when they expire. Fishbowl may not have a field dedicated specifically to warranties, but it does have custom fields, which you can use for any purpose. So you can add a custom field for warranties to keep track of the date they must be exercised by in order to apply to an RMA.

Customer Status

Not every customer is the same. Some are more loyal than others and have a longer history with you, so it might be nice to reward them with more generous return policies. In Fishbowl, you can set up pricing rules, which lets you divide your customers into different pricing groups. So if you want to offer significant discounts to longtime customers or give special discounts and promotions to new customers, you can easily do so. Then, if someone wants to return an item, you can tell that they’re in a certain group by how much they paid for it and adjust your return policy accordingly.

Authority to Process Returns

Not just anybody should have the ability to approve returns. You may want to make that the purview of managers who completely understand the return process to make sure everything goes smoothly. On the other hand, empowering regular employees to do returns could make the process quicker for customers. Fishbowl has user rights, which let you pick and choose which modules each of your employees has access to. So someone can only use the RMA module and authorize returns if you let them.

Restocking Fees

Restocking fees sometimes apply to returns. These help you recoup the cost of processing a return, shipping it back to your warehouse, and putting it back into inventory. Fishbowl lets you enter a restocking fee as either a percentage or a flat rate. This is nice because you may not want to have a set fee, but one that depends on the cost of the product being returned.

Inventory Management

Once an item is returned, you should be able to let your inventory management system know what you’d like to do with it, whether to restock, scrap, or return it to the appropriate vendor. Fishbowl can do all of these things because the RMA module is built in along with the rest of its inventory management features. You can easily check which vendor you purchased that item from and begin the process of returning it to them for a refund or you can add it back to your inventory or scrap it and instantly update accounting records in QuickBooks to reflect your decision.

Conclusion

Fishbowl’s RMA module gives you a lot of flexibility to handle product returns, replacements, substitutions, and repairs. It helps you speed up the return process and make it easier on customers every step of the way. This post is based on an article from Find Accounting Software. Come back next week for part 2 in this series where I’ll discuss the importance of RMA integration with inventory management software.