3 Challenges of Alaska Seafood Fish Ticket Repricing

When it comes to finalizing fish tickets post-season and accounting for bonuses and adjustments, these post-season price adjustments can be daunting. In order to report your purchasing and processing activities by the time it’s due on April 1st, you have to dedicate the time to deciphering the post-season adjustments and making them, which can be significantly tedious due to the need to be extremely accurate with potentially unreliable data, all while managing expectations based on original forecasts. In order to help you with this overwhelming juggling act, we’ve detailed these three challenges of Alaska Seafood Fish Ticket repricing and provided some suggestions to make these challenges a little less challenging and a lot more manageable.

Challenge 1: Time

SO MUCH TO DO, SO LITTLE TIME

When it’s time to figure out the price adjustments that need to be made and the bonuses that need to be added and then follow through with them, you may just realize how tedious and time-consuming this process can be. For example, you must filter out each unique set of fish tickets requiring specie reprices, chill type bonuses, etc. and then apply the adjustments. Then, once those price changes are made, you need to make sure they’ve accurately affected your fishermen’s balances and then pay out your fishermen and potentially their crew.

Solution: Get more time in your day

If you’re manually tracking or juggling multiple systems to track your fish tickets, fishermen balances, payments and more then this process can become significantly longer than it needs to be. The solution? Stop the manual tracking! Between chill types, gear codes, specie IDs, stat areas and more, there are a lot of data points you need to keep track of on your fish tickets in order to make the correct adjustments when post-season repricing begins. That also means a lot of data to sift through in order to find the right fish tickets to reprice to then manually adjust fishermen balances and pay out. Instead, by using a system that specifically supports Alaska Seafood processors, you can alleviate a lot of manual work (and therefore save time) as the system can track, sort, filter, apply, pay, and integrate at the click of a button. 

Challenge 2: Accuracy

so much data, so little reliability

In addition to the time it takes to manually sift through data in order to find the correct fish tickets to adjust post-season, there’s the added uncertainty of is the data you’re relying on to determine which fish tickets to reprice actually accurate? Was the correct gear code entered at the dock? What about the specie ID? Did the fisherman really use ice to chill his catch? The accuracy of this data is essential to making the right adjustments, so you need to be able to rely on it because once the money is gone from paying out an adjustment, you can’t get it back.

Solution: Get data you can trust

Unfortunately, you can’t guarantee the data is accurate if someone entered the wrong code for a specie or the wrong gear type. However, you can use a system that will check your data to make sure it’s relevant and within standards. Additionally, you can use a system that will track the net change from a reprice before it’s done to verify its accuracy as you can check to see that the amount difference is what you expected to see. 

Challenge 3: Forecasting

so many expectations, so little transparency

Before you even get to making adjustments and repricing your fish tickets, you have cost expectations influenced by run forecasts and harvest projections while your fishermen also have expectations on how much they’ll likely get paid based on these same metrics. However, forecasts and projections aren’t always accurate, just like your chum/red split projection may differ from your actuals, and that means you have to manage expectations as best you can. By managing expectations you can do your best to avoid angry fishermen at the end of the season who didn’t get paid what they were expecting to get paid or, in the worst case, broke even or now owe you! So how do you manage your expectations and your fishermen’s? Through the transparency offered by tracking your real time data.

Solution: Get to tracking

It’s easier to manage expectations when the expectations are rooted in reality. In order to establish those roots, you need a system that can track real time balances so you can see how close or how far you currently are from original projections and you can keep your fishermen informed as to what they can expect based on these real time numbers. With a system that tracks real time balances, including total fish received, fishermen balances, transaction history, and more, you can make better informed decisions and set clearer expectations for yourself and your fishermen.

Make the Challenges Less Challenging

With the challenges of time, accuracy and forecasting, fish ticket repricing can be a drag. But, with a system like NorthScope that was built specifically for Alaska Seafood processors, you can make these challenges a little less challenging with solution that allows you to get more time in your day, get data you can trust and get to tracking.