IceBossPro Blog — Packaged Ice Delivery

Consignment Freezers in Packaged Ice Software

Consignment is the deal that gets you into a lot of doors: you drop a merchandiser at the front of the store, keep it full, and the account only pays for the bags that ring through the register. No upfront purchase, no dead stock the owner has to eat. It's a great way to win a location — and a nightmare to track on paper. You're carrying inventory that lives in someone else's building, you don't get paid until it sells, and the difference between what you delivered and what got scanned at the checkout is the number that decides whether the account is worth keeping. Handling that math by hand is exactly where consignment routes bleed money, and it's exactly what packaged ice delivery software is built to close off.

A consignment freezer is a different kind of account

In IceBossPro you flag a merchandiser as consignment when you set it up, and that one setting changes how every delivery to it behaves. A standard account gets billed the moment the driver drops bags. A consignment freezer doesn't — the bags you deliver become on-hand stock the software tracks as still belonging to you, sitting inside the customer's box. The account owes you nothing until product moves. That distinction has to live in the system, because the second you try to remember which of forty freezers is sold-outright and which is consignment, you start invoicing the wrong ones and eroding trust with the accounts you worked hardest to land.

Par-levels and planograms keep the box honest

Every consignment merchandiser carries its own par-level — the full-stock target for that specific box — and its own planogram so the driver knows how the 7lb bags, 20lb bags, and blocks should be arranged. When the driver arrives, the app shows the target and asks for a count of what's physically in the freezer. The gap between par and the current count is what sold since the last visit, and that's the number the driver tops back up to. Because the count happens on the merchandiser screen every single trip, you build a running record of movement per location without anyone doing arithmetic on a clipboard.

Settlement is the count, not a guess

The heart of consignment is settlement, and settlement is nothing more than: bags delivered, minus bags remaining, equals bags sold. IceBossPro does that subtraction automatically at each visit. The driver counts what's left, the software knows what it delivered last time, and it calculates units sold for the period. That figure — not a rounded estimate, not the store manager's word — is what generates the invoice. You get paid for exactly what moved, and the account owner can see the same numbers you can. When a consignment freezer under-performs, you see it in the movement data early enough to pull the box and put it somewhere busier instead of subsidizing a dead corner for six months.

Billing that only charges for sold bags

Once units sold is calculated, consignment billing runs on its own track. IceBossPro invoices the account for sold quantity at your agreed per-bag consignment rate, leaves the unsold on-hand stock on your books, and files it all under that customer. Card-on-file means the settlement charge can run automatically on your billing cycle instead of you chasing a check for a variable amount every week. The whole point — that the number changes every period based on real movement — is what makes consignment so painful manually and so clean once the software owns the count.

Shrink, melt, and the bags that never sold

Not every missing bag was sold. Some melted during a cooler failure, some got damaged, some walked out the door. If you settle purely on "delivered minus remaining" you'll bill the account for bags that never crossed a register, and that's how you lose a location. IceBossPro separates true sales from shrink and melt by letting the driver record damaged or lost units against the freezer instead of lumping them into sold. Your settlement stays accurate, your shrink tracking tells you which boxes are running warm or getting pilfered, and you have the data to have a straight conversation with the account instead of an argument.

Every consignment box in one view

Run consignment at scale and the office question becomes "which of my freezers are earning their footprint?" IceBossPro rolls every consignment merchandiser into one report: units moved per box, revenue per location, shrink per location, and which freezers are trending toward empty before their next scheduled visit. You stop treating consignment as a favor you do for accounts and start treating it as a placement decision backed by movement numbers. For a related look at how the driver captures those counts fast at the freezer, see Scan-to-Restock Barcodes in Packaged Ice Software.

Consignment stops being a leap of faith

The reason operators shy away from consignment is that it feels like handing product to a store and hoping the settlement math works out. It doesn't have to feel that way. When the freezer, the par-level, the delivered count, and the remaining count all live in one system, settlement is a calculation the software runs, not a negotiation you have. You get the placement advantage of consignment without the exposure — and you can offer it to more accounts, because keeping them straight no longer depends on how much you can hold in your head.