Most stores that look at their unrestocked refunds for the first time find something, fix the habit, and see the number fall. That part is straightforward. The part that surprises people is what happens two quarters later.
The pattern
Someone new starts on customer service or in the stockroom. They learn the refund screen by watching or by doing. Nobody mentions the Restock checkbox, or they mention it once. The new person is careful and fast, and processes refunds the way the screen suggests.
Within a month, the unrecovered total starts to climb again. Nobody did anything wrong. The process was never written down, and the person who knew it left.
Why cleanups do not hold
A one-time audit finds the backlog. It cannot prevent the next one, because the cause is not a backlog, it is a habit, and habits belong to people. When the person changes, the habit has to be re-learned, and the interval between the change and the re-learning is where the units go.
Seasonal staff make this worse. A store that adds hands for the holiday peak is adding exactly the people most likely to be processing refunds without context, at exactly the time refund volume is highest.
What actually keeps it clean
Two things. A written process, short enough to actually be read: receive the item, decide restock or write-off, then refund. And a standing check that notices when the number moves, so the drift is caught in the first week rather than the first quarter.
The check does the job the process cannot: it does not depend on anyone remembering.
A weekly sentence
The most useful form of a standing check is a short, regular message. Something like: three new exceptions this week, $210 not restocked. Or, in a good week: nothing unaccounted for, forty-one refunds checked. The clean week matters as much as the busy one, because silence otherwise looks like a broken process.
StockReclaim sends exactly that on Starter and above, every week, and its Rule D keeps watching for restocks that did not move stock. It is built to be the check that outlasts the person. See the weekly digest.