SOVA comes integrated with a full featured shipping payment system, useful if you are faced with lost and found items that you need to ship back to customers of your business after they have already departed your property. Having the ability to pass the costs of shipping items back to the customer can add thousands of dollars to your bottom line, and gives your business customers the flexibility to select their carrier of choice and level of service. Other benefits of using the shipping module in SOVA is that it takes the worry of PCI compliance away, as the process of accepting credit cards can now be offloaded to a reputable third party provider where it's no longer your responsibility.

Process shipping in a few easy steps:

• You submit a ship request to your customer via email from within the SOVA interface
  
• Your customer selects the level of service and their preferred carrier (if settings allow multiple carriers) and pays for the shipping
  
• Your system updates to show the shipping has been paid for the item. You print a shipping label from SOVA
  
• You box the item, apply the label, and drop off the package to the selected carrier (or schedule the carrier to pick it up)
  

Let's process a test shipment so you can see each of the steps involved.

1. Navigate to Lost and Found > List Lost/Found. In the screen below, When you place your mouse over the ID column, you'll notice that a tooltip appears telling you that this is a "Stored" item in the second row. Item status can either be:

• Lost - A customer recorded the item as lost using the public website for SOVA, or someone at your place of business entered the lost item into the database
  
• Stored - You have the lost and found item in your posession
  
• Pending - Shipping has been paid for the item and it is ready to be shipped
  
• Claimed. - The item is no longer in your posession, and was returned to the rightful owner either in person, or shipped to them. Details on how it was claimed are always available
  
• Discarded - The item was either given to the person who found it, donated, or discarded. These details are stored with the record and can be retrieved at any time
  

For this example, we have previously setup a book, "War & Peace", and added that to our inventory as a "Found" item, meaning we are in possession of this item, but have not found the rightful owner. This will be the item that we will be mailing back to the owner:

Let's open the stored item for editing. We do this by clicking the action icon in the row and selecting edit from the dropdown menu. Once in the record, we expand the lost drawer and verify that we have a ship address and an email listed for the person who lost the item:

Returning to the listview, we click the action icon and choose "Email Recipient". A popup opens similar to the screenshot below. The information for the ship recipient should already be completed in the top portion. You would need to fill out the:

1. Shipping box dimensions. If you have pre-purchased boxes of various sizes, enter a box dimension that will allow you to ship the book, and add some space for packaging materials which you will include to help protect the item. If you are using an envelope for shipping, set the height = 1
   
2. Estimate the weight of the box, packaging materials and item to be shipped. It's best to get close to the actual weight, as the shipping costs use weight and box size in calculating the shipping cost. You might consider adding an inexpensive digital scale to your shipping operation, so you can place the item to be shipped in a box, add packaging, and get a true weight.
   

Your screen should look similar to this:

If everything looks good, click the green "Send Mail" button. Your customer receives an email that looks like this:

When they click the orange button in the screen above, they are taken to a secure webpage where they can select their shipping details. See the next screen below for an example:

The steps your customer follows in the screen above are shown below:

• Step 1 - your customer selects the declared value, and chooses if they want insurance or not. Optional insurance is offered by a third-party provider http://www.shipsurance.com
  
• Step 2 - the shipping details here should be already filled out. Your customer can choose if the delivery address is a business, as shipping can vary depending on whether the address is a residence or business
  
• Step 3 - your customer selects the carrier and level of service. In this example, only USPS is available, but SOVA can be configured to use UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS, OnTrac, and even some International carriers like ParcelForce, an International courier and logistics company out of the United Kingdom
  

We will go ahead and choose USPS Priority Mail. The total for shipping is calculated at $15.01. Clicking the "Pay" button loads a popup where we can enter our credit card details. As this is a test, we will enter a test credit card in the popup. The screen now looks like this:

The credit card processing is handled by a third-party service. No credit card data is stored or processed on the SOVA servers. This helps maintain PCI compliance. After the credit card is charged, your customer would receive a receipt by email and be presented with a screen like below:

Back in SOVA, we can now refresh the lost and found listview to see a dollar icon added to the record, indicating that shipping has been paid by your customer and that the order is ready to be shipped. After payment is complete, the status of the item has been changed from "Stored" to "Pending". You can easily filter this list to show only Pending items so you can process all of these once per day, or on whatever interval you want:

Clicking the action icon for this record, and we see a new option called "Shipping Label". Select that, and we are presented with another popup where we can chose to print the shipping label and add the tracking number to the record (default setting). The second options allows you to do those things and also change the status of the item to "Claimed". You would use the later if you were applying labels and shipping the items out immediately. If there will be a lag time between printing the shipping label and actually sending the item to the carrier for processing, it's best to choose the default setting instead. For our example, we'll choose the default setting, and click the blue "Go" button:

When you cick the blue Go button, the shipping label will be saved as a pdf. Simply print the pdf using any standard laser printer on 8-1/2x11 letter paper, insert into a packing sleeve or tape to a box and cover with clear tape, and send the item on it's way!

Feel free to review our shipping policy.