Customer Audit

Introduction

TrackAbout provides a feature for visiting a customer's location and performing a physical audit of all assets on premises. Such an audit benefits both you and your customers in that everyone is assured that customer balances are accurate.

Physical Audit with Mobile Devices

One or more client employees armed with mobile devices running TAMobile descend upon a customer location. The employees go room by room, building by building, scanning every asset they can find using the Customer Audit feature of TAMobile. If they find assets that do not have barcodes but which are definitely owned by the distributor, they can perform an Add New action to enter them into the TrackAbout system on the spot. When the employees return to the branch, they sync their scanners. This creates one or more Customer Audit records in the system (and possibly some Add News).

Create Audit Grouping on Trackabout Website

A client admin logs in to the web site to reconcile the audit.

It is very important that you resolve audits in the same order in which they had been completed.

Here is an example of a specific scenario and how resolving the Audits in the correct order makes a difference:

Prior to the Audit, TrackAbout thinks the asset is at Customer B. Assets are scanned at customer A first, where the asset is found, and then at customer B, where the asset is not found.

CASE 1: Audit records are reconciled in the order in which they happened

If the audit for customer A is resolved first, that will create an accounting adjustment, taking the asset off of the balance for customer B. So when the audit for customer B is resolved, the asset is no longer expected to be at Customer B, so the asset does not get marked as Lost. At the end of the day, the asset is at Customer A.

CASE 2: Audit records are not reconciled in the order in which they happened

If customer B is reconciled first, the asset gets marked as Lost. When reconciling Customer A, the asset is found, but that record was before the asset was “lost” so at the end of the day, the asset is lost.

TO RECONCILE AN AUDIT:

1. The first step is to create an Audit via the Create New Audit page. You will be walked through the process step by step. Enter a name for the new audit grouping which is just for internal recognition. Then put a check mark in the box in front of all the Ungrouped Audit Record(s) which should go in this grouping. Click on the Next Page button. All audits which are combined in one grouping will be assigned to the same customer account.

TrackAbout then analyzes all the assets in the collection as a unit. TrackAbout compares the assets actually found on-site against what is supposed to be on-site.

Note - There is a warning after 100 assets have been scanned, and then subsequent warnings for every 10th asset scanned after that There is no hard limit. It is suggested to save often!

Resolving Discrepancies

Discrepancies between expected and actual are called out during the audit reconciliation process on the Incomplete Audit Summary page.

This page will display several columns:

Expected: This column shows how many of each type of asset TrackAbout expected the Customer had prior to the Audit.
Found: This column shows how many of each type of asset was actually found during the course of the Audit.
Difference: This column shows the difference between how many of each type of asset were expected before the Audit, and how many were actually found during the Audit.
Not Found Unique Assets (AKA Lost Assets): This column displays how many unique assets were expected at the Customer site, but were not found during the course of the Audit.
Surprise Finds: This is the number of assets which were found at the Customer site, but it wasn’t known that this Customer had these assets prior to the Audit.

Click on Reconcile This Audit to deal with discrepancies found by the system and to appropriately adjust the customer's balance.

Suprise Finds

The surprise finds page lists barcode numbers that were found on this customer’s balance that were not on it before the audit.

The employees performing the physical audit may have had instructions to recover any Surprise Finds, or not. Therefore the admin might choose to add the Surprise Finds to the customer's balance (to be charged rent), or not.

Lost Assets

There are 3 options for how to handle these not found assets. If there are more than one not found, the same option must be applied to all of the not found.

Basically, they must all either be left on the balance or all marked as lost (which takes them off of the balance). Marking a customer as responsible simply means that this asset will appear on the Lost and Found report on the dashboard whenever it turns up. The report will note that the tank was lost when out to this customer. Basically Option 1 equates to Take off balance and call it a wash. Option 2 to mark the assets as lost and not charge customer anymore for rent, but will charge them for the lost asset (if scanned in future, this will show up in the lost and found on the dashboard). Option 3 keeps charging them (hardly ever selected).

For instance, the admin might mark Not-Founds as "Lost", and he might choose to make the customer responsible for the loss of those assets. The distributor and the customer will negotiate outside of TrackAbout any fees or charges that might need to be levied due to lost assets.

Audit Completion

Upon successful reconciliation of the audit, a reconciliation report is generated and stored in the system. The customer's balance may have been modified as a result of how the admin decided to reconcile the audit.

Location Audit

You can perform locations inventory update by following these steps:

Using a mobile computer, perform a LOCATE action and start scanning all the cylinders at the location you want to update. While scanning, save every 50 to 100 scans as a precaution. Be sure to sync the mobile computer when done. This process might take a few days, just save and sync frequently.
Once all assets have been scanned, remove the stale inventory using X days since last scan. Replace X with the number of days since you started the locate action in the previous steps. Here is a link to the Remove Stale Inventory: Remove Stale Inventory. This will remove almost all assets that you didn't scan and mark them as lost.
Your freshly inventories location is now up to date

Troubleshooting Audits

Problem - An asset that was marked as lost during an audit reconciliation does not show as lost once the reconciliation is completed.

Consider the following scenario:

Start with a brand new customer

Deliver asset 111 to the customer of AssetType A
The barcode is damaged or falls off while there
The asset is returned as a RNS since it couldn't be scanned.

Now when you do the Customer Audit, you won't find 111 on the balance anymore, because it is no longer at the location. When the audit logic tries to reconcile, it sees that there were RNS of that type, so it figures that the missing asset was one of those RNS and just marks it as returned, rather than returning it and marking it as lost.