At a water purification plant, every jug that leaves the facility is money lost. As long as the customer has it, the jug is still yours, but if no one keeps track, sooner or later it stops coming back. Most water purification companies don’t lose jugs all at once—they lose them one by one, week after week, without even realizing it.
In this guide, you’ll learn why this happens, how much it costs you, and how to order water jugs without complicating your delivery drivers’ work.
Why Do Water Jugs Go Missing?
In almost all cases, the cause is not the customer’s bad faith, but rather a lack of record-keeping. The most common situations are:
- The delivery person leaves an extra jug “in the meantime,” and no one makes a note of it.
- The delivery person on the route has changed, and the new one doesn’t know how many containers each customer has.
- A business lets empty water jugs pile up in the storage room, and they’re never picked up.
- A customer moves or stops shopping and keeps the containers.
- A damaged water jug is discarded without being recorded as a write-off.
How much does it cost you to lack control?
Do the math with your own numbers. If each new jug costs you, say, $70 pesos and you lose five a week, that’s $350 a week—more than $18,000 pesos a year just on containers. Add to that the water you don’t sell when a customer doesn’t have a jug for their next order, and the time your team wastes looking for jugs.
5 Rules for Managing Your Water Containers
1. Each rented water jug is registered in the customer’s name. It’s not enough to know how many water jugs are on the street—you need to know who has them.
2. Filling by vacuum. The standard rule for the route is to exchange a full water jug for an empty one. Any exceptions are noted at the time.
3. Loan or deposit for new customers. Establish a clear policy for new customers: how many containers they can borrow and under what conditions.
4. Daily inventory by pickup truck. So many leave full, so many return empty, and so many full ones unsold. If the numbers don’t add up, you know it the same day—not at the end of the month.
5. Weekly review of account balances. Once a week, check which customers have more water jugs than they should and ask them to return the excess on your next visit.
From a notebook to a system
You can keep track of these rules on paper, but as soon as you have multiple routes or more than one delivery person, a notebook just isn’t enough. With a system like Yaku, the delivery person logs every delivery and every returned container in the app; each customer’s container balance updates automatically, and from the office you can see which containers still need to be picked up on each route. You can also send reminders via WhatsApp to customers with outstanding containers.
If you want to see how it works for your business, check out our software for water purification systems.
Conclusion
Losing water jugs isn’t inevitable—it’s the result of not keeping track of loans. With simple rules and a customer-by-customer tracking system, you can recover containers, manage your inventory, and get more out of your delivery routes.
Sign up and try Yaku for free for 7 days. Plans start at $24 per month.
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