The packaging deposit is worth 50 bani. Around it, every retailer in Romania has had to build a flow that touches the till, the stock, the accounts and a monthly report.
And precisely because it is only 50 bani, the temptation is to treat it as one more line on the receipt. That is where the trouble starts: returned packaging ends up in sellable stock, the deposit is booked as revenue, and at the end of the month somebody assembles the report out of exports and memory.
Below, what the flow looks like when it is kept end to end in the system.
1. The deposit is not a tax. It is a product
The first decision is the one that shapes everything else: the deposit is modelled as a storable product, not as a tax or an amount added on the line. One product for each of the five RetuRO categories:
- small plastic (up to 1000 ml) and large plastic (above);
- metal;
- small glass (up to 500 ml) and large glass (above).
The reason is simple: packaging with a deposit genuinely moves. It enters the shop with the goods, leaves with the customer, comes back empty, is stored separately and is physically handed over. All of these are stock moves, and a system that treats the deposit as a tax cannot follow them.
The deposit product is tied to the drink product: every beverage subject to SGR knows which companion belongs to it.
2. The values change. The history stays
The deposit has been 0.50 lei since the scheme started, but it is not the only amount in play. The retailer gets back a handling fee from RetuRO, which differs by category and by collection method: automated, manual or HoReCa. And these values change from year to year, with interim and final variants.
That is why they are not written in code, but in tables with an effective date. A document issued in the past keeps its own value, and a change of fee means a new row, not a rewrite of history.
3. On documents, the line appears by itself
On the invoice, on the sales order, on the purchase order and on the receipt: you add the drink, and the deposit line appears underneath it, with the right category and the rate of the day, free of taxes — exactly the way RetuRO requires it to appear on the fiscal document.
Two details that matter in practice:
- it does not duplicate. If the invoice comes from an order or from a till receipt that already carried the deposit line, the system recognizes it and adopts it instead of writing a new one;
- it can be switched off per document. On invoices pulled in through e-Factura, for instance, the lines that came from the supplier are left untouched.
4. In the books: a liability, not revenue
The deposit money comes in, but it does not belong to the retailer. That is why the deposit is booked to a liability account — typically 462 Sundry creditors — set once at company level and becoming the default on every deposit product, for both income and expense.
The consequence is that turnover is not inflated with deposits, and the account balance shows, at any moment, how much the shop owes the scheme.
5. At the till, without slowing the cashier down
The cashier scans the drink and two lines appear in the basket: the product at its price and the deposit at the current rate. The customer sees both on the screen and on the receipt, as they should.
Taking packaging back from the consumer is done from a dedicated button: a popup with the five categories, the quantities and the refund method — cash, voucher or bank transfer — kept on the receipt for audit.
The part that only shows up later: when the receipt is closed, the packaging taken in goes to a separate SGR returns location, not into the shop's sellable stock. That keeps the goods stock clean, and what is due to RetuRO is already gathered in one place.
Both the automatic line and the return work while the till is offline: the logic lives in the interface and on the server, as a safety net at sync time.
6. For producers: the component on the bill of materials
A bottler does not receive packaging with a deposit, they put it on the market. For them, SGR belongs to production: the manufacturing order for a drink covered by the scheme automatically consumes the SGR packaging component, without anyone adding it to each order.
7. Handover to RetuRO and the monthly report
This is where the chain ends, and this is usually where it breaks.
Seals have a tracked life cycle: received from the carrier, used at handover, confirmed by RetuRO at the sorting centre. Each state is a fact, not a note.
Pickup events are built per warehouse, carrier and RetuRO partner. Confirming a pickup performs, in one click, the stock transfer out of the returns location and marks the seals as handed over.
The monthly reports required by GD 1074/2021 come out of a single wizard, in three files: packaging placed on the market, seals handed over during the period, and consumer returns. The format is the one to be sent on, not one to be processed by hand.
What you gain, in short
Not "compliance" in general, but three concrete things:
- The stock of returned packaging is real, because it is kept as stock, separate from the goods.
- Turnover is not inflated with money that is not yours.
- The monthly report is generated, instead of being assembled out of exports and recollection — and seals handed over can be proven, because they have a history.
The modules are on Odoo Apps, for Odoo 19 and 20, and install piece by piece, depending on how the company works: the SGR base, then invoicing, sales, purchasing, point of sale, manufacturing and RetuRO operations.
If you want us to look at how your own flow runs — especially if you have both a shop and a warehouse — write to us: nexterp.ro/contactus.