Tarafex answers four different questions, and most people only ever ask one or two of them. Find yours below and ignore the rest — nothing here needs the whole system.
How many kilograms of packaging did we place on each market? That is what an extended-producer-responsibility scheme asks for. You need the catalogue, shipments and the report. You do not need recipes or supplier links.
A customer has sent us a packaging-data spreadsheet to fill in. You need the catalogue, customers and recipes. You do not need shipments or the report.
We do not know what our own packaging is made of. You need suppliers and a link. Nothing else.
We put packaging on the market under our own name and must declare it. You need the catalogue, the profile, and the declaration of conformity on the item.
The catalogue holds every packaging item you use and what one unit of it weighs. Enter it once and no shipment ever asks again. Where an item is sold by length or area — a 250 m roll — say how much is in one unit, and you can then work in metres instead of fractions of a roll.
A supplier’s invoice or delivery note can be read in — Read a supplier document, on the catalogue screen. It proposes, it never writes, and an item already on file is left exactly as it is. A weight is taken only where the document states it per unit. Where it does not, the item arrives with no weight and waits — those are gathered under Waiting to be weighed. A kitchen scale and five minutes clears the list, and every kilogram after that is documented rather than estimated.
Each item also carries a folded-away Compliance data block — recycled content, an FSC claim, country of production, what the material is made of. None of it is required and none of it affects a weight or a report. It exists for questions two to four below, and it can stay empty for ever if none of them is yours. In the catalogue list, the Material data column shows how much of that block a row carries and, where a supplier answered it through a link, their name and the date instead of “entered here”.
Two things in an item are worth a minute even though neither is required. The class under the material is the word a customer’s sheet asks for in its second column — Corrugated fibreboard rather than just Cardboard, Film rather than just Plastic — and without it the same word goes out twice and somebody fills the column in by hand. And several of the compliance fields offer the wording a buyer expects as you type: composition, colour, adhesives, barriers, additives, integrated components. Take the offered phrase where it fits. They are suggestions, not a list you must choose from — the exact words come from national schemes rather than from the regulation, so a customer in another country may ask differently, and your own words are always allowed.
One of those is not cosmetic. A colour containing carbon black defeats infrared sorting, which is why buyers ask about it separately instead of just asking the colour.
A shipment is one load that left: its date, the destination country, whether it goes to a business or an end consumer, and what packaging travelled with it. The country and the receiver are not optional — they decide whose rules apply.
The weight on a shipment line is frozen when you record it. Correcting a catalogue weight next year changes what happens next — never a figure you have already reported.
The report then reads country by country, material by material, B2B and B2C apart. Reusable packaging — pallets — is counted and shown, but never folded into what was placed on the market: a pallet that comes back is not placed on the market a second time, and each scheme treats that its own way. The report also states what share of the kilograms rests on estimates, and names the items behind it.
Units without a weight are held in their own block under the report. A line that carries a number of units and no weight is in no kilogram figure on the page, and Tarafex guesses nothing for it. Some schemes ask in units rather than kilograms — France counts UVC, units of consumer sale, and below its threshold asks for no kilograms at all. Weigh one of each and the line moves into the table above by itself.
Recycled share of this packaging is worked out on a weight basis, never by averaging the components' percentages. A 32 g board box at 70 % and a 4 g bag at 0 % is 62 %, not 35 %. A component nobody has answered for is not treated as a zero — it leaves the sum and is named, and the line underneath says what share of the packaging weight the figures actually cover. The number appears on the recipe, and travels to the customer on the packaging data sheet.
Write a recipe once per customer and product — “60 legs: one pallet, 40 m of film, eight corners”. A recipe is simply what one batch of one product travels in.
Recipes live under Packaging recipes on the customer. Then take the packaging data sheet from the same screen. It is the recipes and the catalogue written out together, one row per packaging component, in the columns such a request normally asks for: recycled content, weights, FSC claim, country of production, composition. A column nobody has filled in comes out blank rather than guessed at.
Three things can appear in a cell of that sheet and they do not mean the same. A figure is an answer. N/A means the question does not apply to that material — a cardboard box has no density, stretch film has no FSC claim — and Tarafex writes it for you, because it already knows. A cell left blank means nobody has answered yet, and that is the one your customer will write to you about. A recycled share of 0 is only sent where somebody actually answered and said none; an item nobody has touched goes out blank rather than looking like a measured zero.
A recipe earns its keep twice: it also turns a shipment into a customer, a product and a number. Sending 90 scales it and says so; whole things round up, measured things do not.
Half of what a customer asks is not knowable from your side of the fence. What a foam is made of, where it was made, whether it carries PFAS — your supplier knows and you do not. So do not retype their PDF. Open the supplier and create a link.
The link and its address live under Packaging data link on the supplier, and what comes back is filed under Declarations received just below it. Every document you have read from them sits under Filed documents on the same screen.
Send them the address. They open one page, with no account and no password, and see only their own materials — never your customers, your shipments or another supplier. They answer for each material and sign a short declaration: heavy metals, REACH substances of very high concern, PFAS, phthalates, flame retardants, substances in inks and adhesives. If they already issue their own declaration of conformity they can attach it; if not, the answers alone are still worth having.
What they send lands straight in your catalogue, carrying their name and the date. That is better evidence than the same figure typed in here, because it says who said it. A link stands open for thirty days, opens as often as they need — a correction an hour later is a second answer, not a new link — and you can switch it off at any moment.
A second answer from the same supplier does not erase the first. The older one is marked superseded and kept, with its own retention period running from the day it was signed — it was true that day, and somebody may have to produce it. And where their new answer changes a figure they had already given, the old figure is kept too and listed under What their answers changed. A material that was 30% recycled in August and 0% in October is a question worth being able to ask.
If a supplier declares something that must not be scrolled past — that a material fails the heavy metals limit, or carries a substance of very high concern — it is spelled out in red on the suppliers list, without opening anything. Each declaration is filed with a number and a retention date: five years, or ten where any of that supplier’s packaging is reusable. Tarafex says when a period ends; it never deletes anything on a date.
The sheet a customer sends you is a recipe: their article number, your product, and what it travels in. You can ask exactly that of your own suppliers, on the same link, and it is worth doing for a plain reason — they know what their product arrives in and you would have to weigh it to find out.
Open a supplier and, under How their product arrives, name the articles you buy from them: a heater, a door, a code you order by. Their link then asks what each one arrives in — a pallet, a box, film, straps — with a weight where they know it. If you have asked about the wrong ones, or missed something they send you, they can add it themselves; you do not have to know every article before you ask.
What comes back does not go into your catalogue. It waits, under Waiting for you, and you put each line in or leave it out. That is deliberate: everything else the link collects fills in fields on items you entered yourself, and this is the one thing that would create new ones. A line you accept becomes a catalogue item carrying their company name and the date, and where an item of that name already exists it is matched rather than duplicated.
And it answers something a workshop otherwise has to notice on its own: a pallet that arrives under somebody else’s goods and leaves under yours is packaging you place on the market.
Whoever places packaging on the market under their own name draws up an EU declaration of conformity — Article 39, model in Annex VIII. If you only buy your packaging, this is not your job: you hold your supplier’s declaration instead, which is question three.
Open a catalogue item and take Declarations of conformity. You get the eight requirements of Articles 5 to 12, and for each you say declared as met or not applicable, with a line saying on what basis. Tarafex offers a starting point where it already holds one — a supplier’s substance answers for Article 5, recycled content for Article 7 — drawn with a dashed border so it cannot be mistaken for your own words. Tarafex declares nothing on your behalf. The responsibility is the signatory’s, and a tool that ticked the boxes would be lying for them.
A draft can be saved and left. Issuing needs every requirement answered, and Article 5 cannot be set aside — the substance restrictions applied from 12 August 2026 with no transition. Once issued, the declaration takes a number, keeps its own copy of the item, and cannot be edited: correcting a catalogue weight next year must not rewrite a document a customer already holds. To change one, issue a new one.
The document prints in the language you choose, because Article 39(2) asks for the language of the market where the packaging is placed. Eleven are available. What you type into a basis line is not translated — write it in the language of the document.
There is a Guide in the top bar, next to Sign out. It is eight steps in the order they are worth doing, each with a real example rather than a description of one, and it opens at the one you have not done. You do not have to work through it: a tick appears by itself as soon as Tarafex can see the thing was done, on whatever screen you were standing when you did it. Leave, come back next week, and it carries on where you stopped.
One step — looking at the report — you tick yourself, because reading leaves no trace and Tarafex will not pretend to have watched you. When all eight are done the button goes away on its own, and Not for me puts it away at any time. Either way a quiet Guide in the same place brings it back.
There is an AI assistant in the bottom corner of every screen, and it answers in your own language — all twenty-four of the Union’s. Write the question the way you would say it. You do not have to work out the English word for something first.
It knows this guide and every screen in Tarafex, so ask it the practical things: where a field is, what one means, what a message on screen is asking for, what to do next. It can also see what you are looking at — which screen, and the message Tarafex is showing you at that moment — so you rarely have to explain where you are.
What it will not do. It will not tell you whether your packaging complies with anything, and it will not tell you what the law requires of your business. Ask it that and it will say so plainly and point you at the place in Tarafex where the answer gets recorded, because that judgement is yours and it is your name on the declaration. It also does not know your item names, your customers or your prices, and it will not guess at them.
The questions people ask are how we find out which parts of Tarafex are badly built. If you have to ask the same thing twice, that is our fault and we would rather know: write to hello@vivifex.com.
Message to Vivifex, at the foot of every screen, is the other way to reach us, and it is not the assistant: it goes to the people who build Tarafex, and we answer in the same place. A dot appears on the button when there is an answer you have not read, and it clears when you open the box — not when the screen loads. Tell us what does not work, what reads badly, or what your buyer asked for that Tarafex could not answer. It is an invitation, not a condition: nothing is asked of you in return for using this.
Where you already hold a registration number for a country, it belongs under Registrations on the profile, and it then prints on the report.
It does not register you in any country, does not act as an authorised representative, and does not pay a scheme. Registration is national and each country runs its own. Tarafex prepares the number you hand over; handing it over is yours. Where you already hold a registration number, put it in the profile so it prints on the report.
Where you register, on the profile screen, names the body that runs the register in each country and links straight to it — LUCID in Germany, BDO in Poland, DPA in Denmark, Naturvårdsverket in Sweden, and the rest. It puts the countries you have actually shipped to at the top, and there is a picker for any other. Ten member states say no data yet rather than a guessed name, and the list carries the date it was checked and the source. It is public information, not our advice, and it changes.
It also says one thing worth knowing before you assume it applies to you. Under Article 45 of the regulation, a producer that is not established in the member state where it first makes packaging available must appoint an authorised representative for extended producer responsibility there, one per country, from 12 August 2026. Whether that is you turns on who places the packaging on that market: if your customer imports it and sells it there, the producer is the customer. That part of the regulation is still being amended.
It also does not certify anything, and it does not decide whether your packaging complies. A supplier’s declaration is their word with their name on it, recorded and dated. Your own declaration is your word, assembled from your data and signed by you. Neither is a test report, and neither is the technical documentation under Annex VII — that you hold yourself.
Download my data, at the foot of every screen, gives you everything in ordinary CSV files a spreadsheet opens — catalogue, shipments, lines, customers, suppliers, recipes and the document list, the supplier declarations, the issued conformity declarations, the profile, the registration numbers, and a list of your stored files with a link to each. No asking, no fee. The database is also copied daily and kept for a month of dailies and two years of monthlies.
A trial fills the catalogue with made-up rows, and starting for real with that mess in the way is nobody’s idea of a beginning. Clear my data, at the foot of the profile screen, empties the work: the catalogue, the recipes, the shipments, the customers, the suppliers, the documents and the files behind them. It shows you the real counts first — if it says six issued declarations, stop and read.
Three things have to happen before the button opens: download your data, type your own password, and write the company name out by hand. A tick box gets clicked without reading; a name has to be written. A file cannot live inside a spreadsheet, so any stored PDFs have to be fetched by hand from the links in files.csv before you clear — afterwards they are gone from the bucket.
Your login, the people on the account and the subscription stay. The company details and the registration numbers stay too, unless you tick the box that clears them as well. The questions you asked this assistant are detached rather than deleted: the text stays with no company behind it, because it is how Vivifex learns which screens are badly built. Nothing here can be undone, and no copy is kept for you.