Thanks, @hazel-meehan and @gijs-van-wiechen this is really useful information - especially with details on two different country’s schemes as hopefully, we can build something that covers all these bases and then when this (presumably) hits England in the future, we’ll have a framework in place. I must admit, I’ve got more to read on this but here are some initial questions/ideas that it would be useful to get your thoughts/feedback on.
Is the “old, retained, new” bit here purely for the transition into the scheme and handling what was already put to market before the date? In the fullness of time, everything sold will be “new”?
I’m thinking that we allow you to define your own deposit types (such as “bottle deposit”, “can deposit”, “own keg deposit” or even “Scotland bottle deposit” vs “England bottle deposit”), the amount to charge as the deposit for each type (and the applicable tax rate). These can later be reported on. Hopefully, this would allow you to define any schemes that were needed and allow you to be flexible as things potentially change in the future, or you move into other markets with different schemes.
We would also add the ability to attach to a product any number of DRS rules. For a rule you could specify:
- Destination delivery country (or countries) to apply to
- Customer types (or all customer types) to apply to
- Applicable “deposit type” (as per your own definitions)
- Quantity of deposit to apply (typically would be one)
We could have gone with container types instead of products, but I think linking deposits to products allows you to be more flexible.
You could sort the rules by their “priority”. When creating an order, we would go through all the products and determine their deposit requirements. If there were multiple rules on a single product, as soon as a rule’s criteria matched the order (delivery country/customer type), this rule would be used and subsequent rules would ignored. The deposit would need to be recalculated whenever:
- The products on the order were changed
- The delivery address was changed
- The customer an order is linked to was changed (or the customer’s customer type was changed)
On this point - as you need to charge your customers for the deposits, I presume this charge must be added to their invoice and increase the value of the invoice. We could have this added as its own line below the product sub-total, much like how a delivery charge appears. This would then allow you to choose an account in your accountancy integration settings, as you can for other types of “Additional charge accounts”, such as delivery. Would this cover what’s needed?
Would you need to specify different accounts/ledgers for different “deposit types” as I’ve suggested above? Or could all types of “deposit type” go through to the same accountancy account?
Finally, how do you think credits should work? I guess when a tracked container is returned, if this had a “deposit” against it, that could automatically trigger a credit note (this should probably be a setting you can enable/disable). How would credits for bottle deposits work? Would you want to be raising credit notes for individual bottles sold in your own tap rooms? What about those sold on your website to end consumers? And finally, those sold to the trade, such as wholesalers or bars.
If a credit note was raised, then Automatically apply credit notes would work well with this.
There are still a number of projects in the list above this, but we are keen to ensure this is done before too long. If anyone else would like to see this, please do give this a vote too.
Please let me know what you think about the above points/ideas/suggestions and if anyone else is reading this and would like to contribute, please do reply below.