Receiving goods

You’ll need: Goods receipts — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

This is the most important lesson in the course. Receiving is where purchasing money is actually lost, and it is the step most often done carelessly because a driver is waiting.

What a receipt records

A receipt number and receipt date, the purchase order it is against, the supplier, and the business location receiving. Supplier delivery note captures their document reference. Lines are what arrived, with currency, notes, proof and a link to the inventory transaction it produced.

A receipt is a sequence, not a tick

A goods receipt moves through events: received, inspected — with inspection notes — and put away. It can be flagged with a discrepancy and discrepancy notes, or cancelled with a reason.

Those are three genuinely different moments, and collapsing them loses information:

   received   the lorry is unloaded, quantities counted
   inspected  someone has actually looked at the goods
   put away   it is on the shelf where it belongs and can be found

Stock that is received but not put away is stock nobody can find. Goods received but not inspected are goods you have accepted sight unseen — and once the driver has gone, damage becomes your problem rather than the supplier’s.

Record what arrived, not what was ordered

The single habit this lesson exists to teach.

If the order said 100 and 94 arrived, receive 94. Never 100.

Receiving what was ordered is faster, feels harmless, and quietly does three things: it puts six units into your stock figure that do not exist, it removes any evidence that the supplier short-delivered, and it lets a bill for 100 pass a three-way match it should have failed.

The discrepancy is not a problem to hide. It is the entire product of this step.

Flag the discrepancy, and write the note

The discrepancy flag with discrepancy notes is how the difference becomes actionable. “Six short” is a start. “Six short — supplier says balance to follow Tuesday, driver confirmed” is a record that settles the conversation in two weeks.

The proof field is where a photograph belongs. A picture of a crushed carton, taken at the gate, is worth more than any amount of later description — and it is the difference between a credit note and an argument.

Receiving moves stock

The receipt is what brings goods into inventory. It creates the transaction, draws down the incoming raised by the purchase order, and puts on-hand up at the receiving location.

That is why receiving accurately matters beyond the supplier relationship: everything downstream — what you can sell, what you must reorder, what your stock is worth — is built on this number.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, receive less than a purchase order ordered, flag the discrepancy and write a note. Then look at the item’s incoming and on-hand figures, and at the transaction the receipt created.