Chain of Custody: Securing Jewellery in Transit

A jeweller's goods spend a surprising amount of their life in someone's hands rather than in a safe. Between showroom and karigar, karigar and refinery, refinery and vault, vault and customer, a single piece can change custody a dozen times. Almost every loss in the trade happens at one of those handovers — and almost none of them are recorded.

Tracking Is Not Custody

A GPS dot on a map tells you where a parcel is. It does not tell you who accepted responsibility for it, when, or on what terms. Chain of custody is a different question with a different answer: at this exact moment, whose problem is this parcel? If your system cannot name that person, you do not have security, you have visibility.

A Verified Person, Not "Our Regular Boy"

The most common arrangement in the trade is also the weakest: goods handed to a familiar face with a phone call and nothing written down. Carriers should be onboarded like employees — ID proof, photograph, active status — and only a verified, currently-active person should be able to accept custody. The acceptance itself should be timestamped and tied to their identity, not to a vehicle number.

Seal and Weight Turn Suspicion Into Arithmetic

Record a tamper-evident seal number and a gross weight at dispatch. Re-verify both at receipt. Now a short-weight dispute stops being an argument about honesty and becomes a question of arithmetic: the parcel weighed this at dispatch, weighs that at receipt, and the seal was intact or it was not. You know not just that something went wrong but where in the route it went wrong.

Proof That Survives

Delivery proof in most jewellery businesses is a WhatsApp photo that gets cleared when the phone runs out of storage. Real proof means an OTP confirmed by the named receiver, a photo captured at handover, a timestamp, and a signed digital receipt attached permanently to the consignment record. The test is simple: would it still be there, and still be credible, eighteen months from now in a dispute?

Deviations Should Speak First

Every route has an expected corridor and an expected duration. When a consignment leaves the corridor or misses its window, the system should escalate before the customer notices. Late deliveries discovered by an angry phone call are a process failure that a monitored SLA quietly prevents.

Custody Should Move the Ledger

The final piece is integration. When custody moves, stock should move — automatically, in the same system. If your delivery tracking lives in one app and your stock in another, the two will disagree, and the gap between them is exactly where goods disappear.