A Working Glossary of Kakobuy Spreadsheet Terms

Chargeable weight decides more parcels than actual weight does. A carton of 40 by 30 by 20 centimetres holds 24000 cubic centimetres, which bills at 4.00 kg under a 6000 divisor while the contents weigh 2.5 kg, and the 1.50 kg gap costs $13.50 at a marginal rate of $9 per kg. Buyers who read a freight quote as a weight usually discover that difference only after the parcel is sealed, which is why the vocabulary below is worth fixing in place before the numbers are used.

Each entry below carries three parts: what the term means in the working sheet, how it is most often misused, and the usage that survives contact with a real parcel. The distinction matters because most spreadsheet errors on this topic are not arithmetic errors. They are a term used in one sense in one column and another sense three columns later.

• Spreadsheet. Meaning: the working file that holds candidate rows, an extraction date, a coverage figure and a six-row fee block, and whose job is to support a decision rather than to catalogue a market. Common misuse: treating it as a price list that stays current once saved, or as a record whose totals can be quoted without the settings behind them. Correct usage: a row is a dated claim, an item price is one of six cost rows, and the sheet is only as current as its newest stamp, which is the failure mode examined at /field-notes/why-spreadsheets-rot/.
• Find. Meaning: a row whose landed cost sits clearly below the median for its own category, such as headwear below the $16.22 median or a T-shirt below $22.23. Common misuse: calling any low price a find without reading the category band, which produces nonsense at the edges of a band such as the Accessories range of $5.17 to $451.10. Correct usage: a find is measured against the category median and supported by the coverage gate, and the annual read at /field-notes/spreadsheet-year-in-numbers/ is where that comparison is kept honest.
• Agent (middleman). Meaning: the party that receives domestic shipments, performs warehouse intake and QC, consolidates items into a parcel and charges for the service. Common misuse: treating the agent as the seller, or as a guarantor of what the seller described. Correct usage: the agent is a fee row, commissioned at 5 percent by default and adjustable, and the agent side evidence is the intake photo rather than the listing photo.
• Domestic shipping. Meaning: the in-country leg that moves an item from the seller to the agent warehouse, charged per item at $1.40 in the default fee block. Common misuse: folding it into the item price so that it vanishes from comparisons and reappears only in the total. Correct usage: keep it as its own row, because it scales with item count: a seven-item parcel pays $9.80 where a one-item parcel pays $1.40, and that difference belongs in the parcel decision.
• Warehouse intake. Meaning: the step at which a received parcel is registered against a row in the sheet. Common misuse: reading intake as confirmation that the item is correct, when it confirms only that something arrived under a label. Correct usage: intake is where the intake photo is taken and where the last cheap opportunity to dispute an identity sits, before the item is committed to a parcel, as the sequence at /field-notes/stage-by-stage-pitfalls/ sets out.
• QC photo. Meaning: a photograph of the received item taken at the warehouse, on the buyer side of the transaction. Common misuse: using listing photos as QC evidence; the current pool carries 2806 listing images at a median of 14 per row, and every one of them was produced by the seller. Correct usage: compare the QC photo against the listing set on the attributes that decide the purchase, and read the five-image gate as documentation coverage, which 158 of 195 rows currently clear.
• GL / RL (green light / red light). Meaning: the release decision that sends an item forward to consolidation or holds it back. Common misuse: issuing a green light by default because freight has already been committed, which converts a cheap rejection into an expensive one. Correct usage: a green light follows a QC photo that matches the stated attributes, and a red light issued before consolidation costs the item alone, while a red light issued afterwards costs the item plus its share of the parcel.
• Consolidation. Meaning: combining received items into one international parcel, which is the unit the $45 freight line is quoted against. Common misuse: treating consolidation as free savings and adding rows without re-checking domestic shipping or billed weight. Correct usage: consolidate while the marginal freight per item is falling, since three items on one $45 line is $15 per item and seven items is under $7, and stop before a second carton is required.
• Chargeable weight. Meaning: the figure actually billed, computed as the greater of actual weight and volumetric weight, so billed equals the maximum of the two. Common misuse: budgeting from an estimate of what the goods weigh, or from a carrier figure quoted without dimensions. Correct usage: compute both numbers and take the larger, because a light rigid carton can bill at 4.00 kg while weighing 2.5 kg.
• Volumetric divisor. Meaning: the number that converts volume into weight, applied as length times width times height divided by the divisor. Common misuse: assuming one divisor applies everywhere, or that a stated divisor is a property of the parcel rather than of the quote. Correct usage: record which of 5000, 6000 or 7000 was used, since the same carton bills at 4.80 kg, 4.00 kg or 3.43 kg, a spread of $12.33 at a marginal rate of $9 per kg.
• Declared value. Meaning: the figure submitted for a parcel and tested against the destination threshold to decide whether tax applies. Common misuse: conflating it with the item subtotal, or assuming it is the same number for every destination. Correct usage: declared value matters only where a threshold exists, so keep it visible next to the destination row and record which line was tested.
• De minimis threshold. Meaning: the value at which destination tax and handling begin: US $800 at 0 percent, UK £135 at 20 percent VAT with an £8 fee, Germany €150 at 19 percent with €6, Canada CAD 20 at 13 percent with CAD 9.95, Australia AUD 1000 at 10 percent, and Poland €150 at 23 percent with a fee that is not confirmed. Common misuse: reading the threshold as a flat exemption and the handling fee as part of the tax rate. Correct usage: keep the threshold, the rate and the fee as three fields, which is also the structure the per-category assessment at /field-notes/eu-per-category-duty-rule/ assumes.
• Free storage window. Meaning: the period after intake during which storage carries no charge, which sets the deadline for the consolidation decision. Common misuse: treating the window as open-ended because no storage charge has appeared on the account yet. Correct usage: record the intake date and the window length per warehouse, and where the window itself is unconfirmed, keep the intake date anyway, because it is the only field that can be reconstructed later.
• Rehearsal packing. Meaning: a provisional pack at the warehouse that reports measured weight and dimensions before the parcel is dispatched, so the freight line can be tested against real numbers. Common misuse: skipping it because the item weights are known, when actual weight does not bound a volume-driven charge. Correct usage: request it whenever a parcel contains a rigid carton or a shoe box, then compare the reported dimensions against the 40 by 30 by 20 example above.

The index below lists the same fourteen terms against the stage where each one changes a number, with the anchor value that makes the term checkable. Where an anchor is marked unconfirmed, that is a statement about the reference set rather than about the term, and the questions page at /faq/ is the place to look for terms that are not covered here.

Two terms on the list carry most of the money, and they are the two that most often arrive as assumptions: chargeable weight and the de minimis threshold. One is decided by dimensions and a divisor, the other by a value line and a destination. Both are checkable in advance, and neither depends on anything the seller does, which is what separates them from the terms that describe a listing.

A parcel that stops moving is the one case where this vocabulary stops helping, because the question changes from what a term means to what a stage is called. The sequence at /field-notes/parcel-stopped-moving/ handles that case, and it depends on having kept intake and dispatch as separate dates in the sheet rather than as one status field.