Procurement glossary
The documents and terms that decide what surplus material is worth, defined plainly. Every one of them appears somewhere on a Surply listing.
- Certificate of Analysis
- The manufacturer's signed test record showing a specific batch met its published specification.
- Safety Data Sheet
- The 16-section hazard document that governs how a material is transported, stored and handled.
- Batch or lot number
- The manufacturer's identifier for one production run, and the key that ties goods to paperwork.
- Retest date
- The date a material must be re-tested to stay usable — not the date it becomes waste.
- Ex-works (EXW)
- The Incoterm where the buyer collects from the seller's site and carries cost and risk from that point.
- Dangerous goods
- Materials classified as posing a transport risk, governed in Australia by the ADG Code.
- Surplus stock
- Good material a business no longer needs — distinct from obsolete, damaged or distressed stock.
- ABN verification
- Confirming a trading counterparty is the registered entity it claims to be, via the ABR.
- Provenance
- The documented history of a material: who made it, which batch, how it has been held.
- Storage conditions
- The environmental limits a material must be held within for its documentation to remain valid.
- Certificate of Conformance
- A supplier's signed declaration that goods meet the agreed requirement — an attestation rather than test data.
- Technical Data Sheet
- The descriptive sheet explaining how a material typically behaves — informative, not contractual.
- Good Manufacturing Practice
- The quality system governing how a site manufactures — a property of the facility, not of any one batch.
- Allergen declaration
- The statement of allergens present in a material, or possible through shared equipment.
- Specification
- The agreed set of properties and acceptance limits a material must meet to be fit for use.
Why the paperwork is the price
Surplus material is rarely sold because anything is wrong with it. It is sold because the business holding it no longer needs it. What separates a batch worth close to its replacement cost from a batch worth scrap value is almost never the material itself — it is whether the documented history is intact and can be read. These definitions are the vocabulary of that history.