Goods receiving
Receive deliveries against the supplier's delivery note, so what you unpack reaches your stock with the right quantity and price.
Goods receiving is the moment a cardboard box turns into stocked articles. You receive the delivery against the supplier's delivery note and check it line by line against what is actually in the box. What matches is entered into stock with the correct quantity and the correct price, and what does not match shows up immediately instead of being discovered much later. Unpacking is the only moment when the box, the delivery note and the person who opened it are all in the same place at the same time. Miss it, and a back-ordered or wrongly shipped item becomes both hard to trace and hard to do anything about.
Where stock levels start to drift
Most errors in a stock level originate not at the point of sale but at receiving. A box unpacked and put on the shelf without being registered leaves the article present physically but absent from the system, and the next time someone looks for it, it gets ordered again. If the delivery also contains a back order, the quantity goes wrong without anyone noticing. Getting it right while unpacking is always easier than tracking down the cause a month later.
Checking against the delivery note
You start from the supplier's delivery note and tick the delivery off against it. The quantity that genuinely arrived is what gets registered, not the quantity that was on the order, and that difference is precisely what otherwise creeps into your levels. The price follows the item into stock, so the purchase value is right from the outset. If something is missing or left over, you still have the paperwork while the box is standing right there.
From box to sellable shelf
A received item is also a sellable item: it appears in searches, can be promised to a customer and can be found by someone other than whoever unpacked it. As long as it sits unregistered it is effectively invisible to everyone except the person who happened to see the box. If there is anyone in the shop besides you, that difference decides whether stock works as shared information or as private memory.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I need a delivery note to receive goods?
- The delivery note is the starting point, because it is what you check the box against. It is also the reason quantity and price come out right without anyone having to retype them.
- What do I do with back-ordered lines?
- They are treated as what they are, items that did not arrive with this delivery. Levels are updated with what actually turned up, so the rest is not counted as in stock.
- Is the cost price updated on receiving?
- The price from the delivery follows the item into stock, so the purchase value is correct from the start rather than needing correction afterwards.
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