Platform · 02

Lots, quantities and processing

How a company records its harvests, deliveries and processing, how quantities and units work, and how mistakes are corrected without rewriting history.

Products

A company first builds its catalog of products: what it traces, with the commodity code of its country (HS, NCM, CN, HTS and others, checked against the official lists), the unit people see it in, and how long a lot keeps. A group of companies keeps one catalog that each company adopts with its own national code.

Lots can also carry GS1 identifiers (GTIN for the product, GLN for a site) and, for goods that fall under EUDR, the reference of the due diligence statement.

Quantities and units

Every product has a base unit chosen by what it measures: kilograms for mass, litres for volume, pieces for things that are counted. Lots are recorded in that base unit.

People still work in the units they know. A form accepts tonnes, pounds, bags or bushels and converts them exactly; bags and bushels depend on the product (a bag of coffee is not a bag of soy). When a conversion does not land on a whole unit, the form shows the rounded quantity and asks for confirmation. Nothing is rounded without saying so. Lists and pages show each lot in the product's display unit, with the recorded quantity under Recorded as.

Lots recorded in whole tonnes or bags before the base unit can still be used. To move part of one, Record in kilograms creates a lot of the same product with the same quantity, origin and dates in the base unit; it is approved like any processing.

Registering a lot

A lot is registered when a company harvests it or receives it from a producer. The lot records its product, quantity, the company's own lot code, harvest and expiry dates, and an origin reference of the farm or plot. The origin reference is never made from the plot's location, so the public record says nothing about where a farm is.

A crop sold before harvest can be registered as Not yet harvested and completed with the harvest day later.

Deliveries

A delivery hands a lot, or part of it, to a customer, warehouse or processor. Several lots can go in one delivery: every lot goes, or none does. The company's lot rules are checked before anything moves; when a receiver is not yet allowed to receive lots, the delivery says so and waits until the company's administrators allow that receiver.

Lots delivered by another company that also uses the platform arrive under Received, with their certificates and the evidence that company shares.

Processing

Processing makes new lots from existing ones, and every new lot keeps the link to its inputs:

Split a lot into several, or merge lots of the same product.
Process lots into another product: drying, hulling, roasting, milling, crushing, slaughter.

The form compares what goes in with what comes out in the same unit and warns when the output looks too high or too low for the product.

Lineage

Every lot can be followed back to its farms and forward to everyone who holds part of it. When a lot came from another company's lot, its page shows Comes from with that lot, even across companies. This lineage is what a recall uses to find every lot that may be affected.

Status changes and corrections

The history of a lot is never edited. Instead:

a lot can be put on hold while something is checked, marked unfit after a failed analysis, released again or closed for good;
wrong information (a name, lot code, quantity, date, origin or grade) is corrected: the corrected version replaces the current one once approved, and the earlier version stays on record;
goods that were lost, spoiled, destroyed or used up outside the records are removed from the records, with the reason, once the owner approves.

Each of these is a proposal that a person approves, and each appears in the lot's Story.

Checking a lot from outside

Each version of a lot's information has a fingerprint recorded on the ledger. Anyone can recompute it from the published information and compare, without an account and without relying on A-REX.