Pallets: Move, Merge, Split — Without Losing the Audit Trail

Pallets in an ITAD warehouse are a working surface, not a permanent home. A pallet gets built at receiving, sits while testing happens, gets split when half the assets fail, gets merged with another pallet when both are half empty, and finally gets dismantled at outbound when the assets ship. The platform records every one of those steps as a movement, so the pallet’s life is readable afterwards without anyone reconstructing it from memory.

Seven formats, plus your own

Every new tenant starts with seven pallet formats: Euro, Half, Quarter, Industrial, Roll Container, Gitterbox and Custom. Each carries its dimensions and an asset capacity, and your team can add formats of its own under Settings → Locations. A format describes the physical object; it does not police what goes on it. There is no rule that keeps a Grade D laptop off a pallet of Grade A ones — that is a sorting decision your operators make, not a constraint the software invents. Removing a format from Settings goes through a confirmation dialog that first shows what depends on it, and a format that is a system default or still in use stays put.

A pallet always sits on a rack slot

Creating a pallet from the pallet list opens Storage racks, because a pallet without a location is a question nobody wants to answer at 07:00. You pick a rack, place the new pallet on a free slot, and it exists from that moment with a barcode, a format, a status and a location path. Pallets also come into being during receiving work, when the dock builds them as assets are scanned in.

Move, merge, split

From the pallet detail your team can move the pallet to another slot, merge it with another pallet, or split it. Merge checks one thing before it goes ahead: whether the target pallet has the capacity for the incoming assets. Split takes the assets you select and puts them on one new pallet of the same format at the same location; if you need three, you split three times. Each of these writes movement history with the source and target pallet, so a merge never swallows the identity of the pallet that disappeared.

The detail page

Pallet detail shows barcode, format, status, dimensions, capacity, weight and height, the current location path, source and tracking context, the assets on the pallet, movement history, and linked documents and photos where they exist. From there your operators can scan an asset onto the pallet, send the pallet’s assets to testing, print a pallet label, add an asset by asset tag, serial, client tag or barcode, and remove an asset with a transfer reason and an optional note. There is deliberately no “Edit pallet” button: the real changes to a pallet are a move, a merge, a split or a correction, and each of those leaves a trace. A free-text edit would not.

Corrections are history, not shortcuts

Adding or removing assets by hand is meant for the moment the physical pallet and the digital one disagree. Those corrections write transfer history like any other movement. They are not a way to bulk-receive a load or to pick an outbound order — receiving and outbound have their own flows, with their own reconciliation, and the pallet correction is not a back door around either. Where did pallet 4471 go in March? Open it. The answer is a list, not a rumour.