Clear scope. Transparent pricing. Verified workpapers.
Producer Ledger provides focused data assembly and reconciliation for consumer brands facing state packaging EPR deadlines. While seven U.S. states have enacted packaging EPR legislation, our immediate fee calculations focus on California, Oregon, and Colorado — the three states with active fee schedules or imminent enforcement deadlines. The normalized packaging inventory we build is designed to scale across all seven states as programs in Minnesota, Maryland, Washington, and Maine phase in through 2028 and 2029.
When brands bring in Producer Ledger
Brands usually email when one of these shows up:
- Specs are scattered across inboxes: Packaging drawings, supplier spec sheets, and tare weights live in multiple email threads and portals, with no central bill of materials.
- Co-packers become unresponsive: You asked your manufacturers for exact component gram weights and material layers, but the requests have stalled or returned incomplete answers.
- A CAA notification arrived: Circular Action Alliance emailed your company about registration or reporting deadlines, and leadership needs to know your true exposure and filing obligations.
- SKU lists hide shared packaging: Your product catalog contains hundreds of SKUs, but they actually share a dozen standard boxes, pouches, and shippers that have not yet been consolidated.
- Fee numbers lack documented sources: Someone provided an estimated EPR budget, but nobody can identify which state schedule version or calculation rules were used to generate it.
Our service ladder
1 · Free Fit Check
Time: 20 minutes · Fee: $0
We review your active selling states, rough revenue and tonnage bands, estimated configuration count, and the current state of your packaging records. We confirm whether our process is a good match before anyone spends money.
2 · Packaging Data Diagnostic
Scope: Up to 25 configurations · Fee: $1,500 – $2,500
Designed for quick procurement without lengthy approvals. We inventory your source files, map your configurations, grade your component evidence, and provide an actionable gap register alongside a fixed proposal for complete filing preparation.
3 · Filing-Ready Pilot
Scope: Up to 50 configs, CA/OR/CO · Fee: $5,000 – $10,000+
The complete 9-artifact workpaper package. Includes normalized BOMs, statutory category mappings, dual mass and commercial reconciliations, versioned fee estimates, draft portal workbooks, and a formal client sign-off pack.
4 · Annual Managed Update
Cadence: Quarterly & Annual · Fee: Fixed annual agreement
Continuous support to monitor state regulatory updates, capture packaging changes on a quarterly basis, refresh annual sales volumes, update fee calculations against new PRO schedules, and reconcile state invoices.
The nine artifacts in your filing-ready package
A defensible compliance filing requires thorough documentation. Our core deliverable includes nine specific artifacts:
- Normalized packaging bill of materials: A master register detailing every separable component per packaging configuration, including measured tare weights in grams with tolerances, material families, and evidence grades.
- Scope and producer assumptions register: A documented record of reporting entities, sales channels, and statutory exclusions, reviewed and approved by your team or legal counsel.
- Multi-state category mappings: Component-by-component mappings to California, Oregon, and Colorado reporting categories, backed by statutory citations, rule versions, and retrieval dates.
- State-supply aggregation: Destination sales figures broken down by state and distribution channel, tied directly to warehouse extracts and sales reports with extraction dates recorded.
- Sourced fee estimates: Fee projections calculated against published state schedules, clearly distinguishing active statutory rates from provisional planning ranges.
- Unresolved exposure register: A clear tracking log of any missing specifications, unverified weights, or ambiguous classifications, with specific owners assigned to resolve each item.
- Draft portal reporting workbook: A pre-populated submission file structured to match the active Circular Action Alliance portal template, separating data years and program years properly.
- Client certification record: A formal sign-off package summarizing totals, methodology, and assumptions, ensuring your leadership reviews and approves all data prior to submission.
- Evidence archive and audit trail: A secure archive of all source documents and calibration records, maintaining version control so changes can be tracked and verified over time.
Optional: packaging scenario analysis
If your team is considering material changes, we can model the fee implications under published state schedules. One example is switching from a multi-layer barrier film to a mono-material pouch or recyclable paperboard. We keep EPR fee calculations distinct from procurement costs, tooling investments, barrier performance, and product shelf-life considerations, giving your packaging engineers clean data to evaluate.
What happens if your data is incomplete?
Incomplete data is normal for growing consumer brands. If your current records have gaps, we do not guess or fabricate numbers. Instead, we document the missing components in your unresolved register, show you exactly how each gap impacts your filing, and provide your team with structured technical request templates to send to suppliers and co-packers.
Producer Ledger provides data assembly and technical reporting support. We do not provide legal opinions regarding statutory producer status, commercial contract interpretation, or regulatory enforcement actions. We do not guarantee fee savings or formal agency acceptance, and we never submit reports to compliance portals without your explicit written authorization.
Straightforward procurement
We price our Packaging Data Diagnostic at $1,500 to $2,500 so an Operations Director or Supply Chain Lead can get started immediately under single-signer authority or with a corporate card. It turns an overwhelming compliance task into a structured inventory and gives your finance team an accurate view of scope before committing to full filing preparation.
Regulatory background
Every fee number we produce traces to a named schedule version and a cited statute. Start with the seven-state timeline, then the live-state notes: Oregon status and 2027 rates,Colorado dues and the dry-short-ton trap, andCalifornia early fee vs. 2027 schedule. Threshold questions are answered separately: tonnage tests differ by state,producer identity and assignment, andwhat penalty statutes actually say.