The distributor says eleven months. The pharmacy says nine.
A pharmacy holds medicines expiring in four months. Under the return terms it can send them back for credit, and the distributor sends them to the manufacturer.
The return is rejected because the two records disagree about when that batch was delivered.
The batch number is legible and the delivery note is somewhere. Resolving it costs more staff time than the medicine is worth, so pharmacies write it off.
One box of expiring stock, travelling backwards
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04
Boxes it and sends it back
The pharmacy
Batch AJ-4471, four months from expiry, packed with a delivery note copied from the pharmacy's own system. They believe delivery was nine months ago.
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03
Receives and checks
The distributor
Their record says the batch was delivered eleven months ago, which puts it outside the return window. The two dates come from two systems that were never reconciled.
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02
Sent back to the pharmacy
The rejection
No credit issued. The pharmacy now holds stock it cannot sell, cannot return, and must eventually destroy at its own cost.
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01
Never sees it
The manufacturer
The batch that should have gone back for credit stops at the distributor. The manufacturer's returns data is missing a box it was contractually prepared to take.
The batch number is on every carton. The delivery date is the only contested fact, and it is the one thing nobody recorded jointly at the moment it was true.
If you return stock, accept returns, or issue credit for them.
Early design work, with nothing running anywhere. The most useful thing you can send is your real rejection reasons and roughly what a year of write-offs comes to.