IceBossPro Blog — Packaged Ice Delivery

Managing 7lb and 20lb Bag SKUs in Ice Software

The 7lb bag and the 20lb bag are the backbone of nearly every packaged ice route, and how you set them up in software shapes everything downstream — pricing, restock quantities, invoices, and inventory. Get the SKU structure right and the rest of the system just works. Get it sloppy and you spend the season untangling mismatched counts. This post walks through building and managing bag SKUs inside packaged ice delivery software so each size behaves as its own clean, priceable, countable unit.

Why each bag size is its own SKU

It is tempting to track ice as one lump number of “bags,” but a 7lb bag and a 20lb bag are different products with different weights, prices, freezer footprints, and burn rates. Treating them as separate SKUs is what lets the software price them independently, count them independently, and suggest the right restock quantity for each. When a driver drops ten 7lb bags and five 20lb bags at one stop, the system records two distinct line items, and the invoice, the inventory count, and the shrink report all stay honest. Collapse them into one and every number gets fuzzy.

Setting up the SKU record

Each SKU in the catalog carries the details the rest of the platform needs. You give the 7lb bag its own price, its own barcode for scan-to-restock, its case or pallet configuration, and its IPIA label information — the manufacturer identification and address the packaged ice standard requires on every bag. You do the same for the 20lb bag with its own numbers. Because these fields live on the SKU, a price change to the 20lb bag updates every account and every future invoice at once, and a barcode scan on the truck resolves instantly to the right product.

Per-account bag mixes

No two accounts sell the same mix. A bar might move almost nothing but 7lb bags for cocktails, while a campground down the road lives on 20lb bags for coolers. Packaged ice delivery software lets each account define which SKUs it carries and at what par-level, so the driver sees the correct mix per freezer rather than a generic list. The route sheet for the bar shows a 7lb par and no 20lb line; the campground shows the opposite. That per-account structure is what makes suggested restock quantities meaningful instead of noise.

Restock quantities by size

Because par-levels are set per SKU, the restock math is done per SKU too. At each stop the app compares the on-hand count of 7lb bags against the 7lb par, does the same for 20lb bags, and shows a suggested drop for each. The driver can override either number when a freezer is fuller or emptier than expected. This keeps a fast-moving 7lb line topped up without over-stocking a slow 20lb line that would just sit and melt. One blended number could never do that; two SKU-level numbers do it automatically.

Pricing and per-bag billing

Clean SKUs make billing effortless. Since each size has its own price, an invoice built from a delivery lists the 7lb bags and 20lb bags as separate priced lines, totaled without anyone doing arithmetic. If you run a wholesale tier for a big account, the SKU price can vary by customer while the underlying product stays the same. Per-bag invoicing, per-delivery charges, and consignment all pull from these SKU prices, so the money side never drifts from what the driver actually dropped.

Inventory and shrink by SKU

Tracking each size separately pays off again in the warehouse and on the truck. The software knows how many 7lb and 20lb bags were loaded, delivered, and returned, so shrink and melt surface per size. That matters because the two sizes often behave differently — a 20lb bag left in a warm truck bleeds more than a stack of 7lb bags. Seeing the loss by SKU tells you which product and which route to tighten, instead of one vague total that hides the real culprit.

Adding new sizes later

Most operations do not stop at two sizes. When you add a 10lb bag, a block, or a cube pack, you simply create another SKU with its own price, barcode, and label, and it drops into the same machinery — par-levels, scan-to-restock, invoicing, and shrink tracking all pick it up with no rework. Structuring your 7lb and 20lb bags cleanly from the start is what makes that expansion painless.

For a related look at moving off manual tracking entirely, see Packaged Ice Delivery Software vs Spreadsheets