“Well, we’d like to be able to give everyone 100% of the material they sent in back.  The problem is when we receive compounds we receive compounds of different qualities.  The purity of the material that you send in can have an impact on how much you actually recover.

For example, if you sent a salt form and we sent back a free acid or free base.  You’re going to recover less simply because you’re not recovering the counter ion at the same time.

Or, if the material doesn’t solidify at the end of our processing – how much solvent is entrained with the material that we have to send back.

So generally, what we tell people is that we aim to recover 95% of the area under the chromatographic peak.  And that means that, you ought to get the lion’s share of your material back, but it depends on the quality of the material coming in when you calculate numerical recovery.”