Most companies already have a laptop return process. It is an email.
Here is what the manual version involves, what it honestly costs, where it breaks, and a calculator that uses your numbers instead of ours.
Eight steps, and none of them are hard
That is the honest part. Nothing here needs a vendor. The materials come to about $60 a return, which is less than one of our credits. The cost is in the third column.
- 01Buy a padded laptop boxRetail, roughly $28. Ships to your office first.Office manager or IT
- 02Print an outbound labelTo the employee. Roughly $9 to $12 by ground.IT
- 03Print a prepaid return labelBack to you. Roughly $22 to $25 for a laptop.IT
- 04Pack the empty kit and ship itBox, return label, a note. A trip to the carrier.Whoever is in the office
- 05Email the employeeFrom a company address. The employee no longer works there.IT or HR
- 06Follow upWeekly. By the third one, everyone dreads it.IT, then HR, then the manager
- 07Watch the trackingTwo tracking numbers per device, in a spreadsheet.IT
- 08Receive, inspect, logThen update the asset register. If the box arrives.IT
Multiply the third column by however many people leave this year. Then add the returns where step six runs for a month and step eight never happens.
The process is fine. The sender is the problem.
Every manual return is a request from the company that just let someone go, to the person it let go. No amount of tooling changes who is asking.
The email goes unanswered
The person reading it was let go by the company sending it. Silence is not malice, it is the most ordinary reaction there is, and there is nothing in a follow-up cadence that changes it.
The kit arrives and sits
A box in a hallway is a chore with no deadline. Weeks pass. The prepaid label inside has an expiry date, and nobody on your side can see the clock running down.
The label expires
Carrier labels are valid for a limited window. Once it lapses the kit is a box with a dead sticker in it, and the only way forward is to start the whole cycle again, from the same company address, to the same person.
Run it on your own numbers
Every field is editable and every default is a guess about someone else's team. Our side counts credits only. If you want to be hard on us, leave the recovery line at zero and compare on time and materials alone.
- Doing it yourself
- $2,844
- Staff time$2,100
- Materials$744
- Devices not recovered$0
- LaptopReturn credits
- $1,020
- Per return at this volume$85
- Your team's time per returnabout a minute
Difference per year
$1,824
In your favour if you switch, before counting a single lost device.
Credit prices are the published tiers on our pricing page, applied to your annual volume. First return is free and is not deducted here.
A neutral party gets a different answer
When the request comes from us, it is not from the company that ended the job. It is a logistics company asking for a box to be dropped at a carrier, with the label already paid for. That is a much easier thing to say yes to, and people do.
The follow-ups come from us too, by email and text, on a schedule, in a tone that stays professional on the tenth day because nobody on our side is frustrated. Your team never sends the awkward third email, and your former employee's last memory of the company is not being chased for a laptop.
And when the box lands, you have a record of every scan on both legs, which is what an audit actually asks for. See chain of custody for what that record contains.
Try it on one device. It is free.
Submit a return in under a minute and watch what happens when someone else does the asking. No card, no contract, no account minimum.