Goods in: the ten minutes that decide whether your stock record is true

Goods in is the least glamorous part of running a store and the only part where an error is guaranteed to propagate. A miscount at the shelf affects one line until the next count. A miscount at receipt becomes the opening balance that every subsequent transaction is measured against, and it can sit there for a year looking exactly like a theft problem.

It is also, in most places, done by whoever happened to be near the door.

The three numbers that must agree

A receipt is a reconciliation between three separate claims, and the discipline is to keep them separate until they are checked.

The near-universal shortcut is to book in from the delivery note. It is quick, it is legible, and it is a supplier’s assertion. Booking from it means your stock record now contains what someone else says they sent, and the difference between that and reality will be discovered months later by a stocktake, at which point it has become your problem to explain.

Signing the delivery note confirms that boxes arrived. It does not confirm what is in them, and the driver is not waiting while you find out.

What to check, given that you cannot check everything

Nobody opens every carton. The realistic policy is risk-weighted, and it should be written down so it is a policy rather than a mood.

• Count outer packages against the note before the driver leaves. This is the only check with a time limit on it, because shortages claimed after the driver has gone are a negotiation rather than a fact.
• Open and count anything high value, anything with a history of discrepancies, and anything where the unit of issue is ambiguous.
• Check damage on anything that looks wrong from the outside, and photograph it there and then. A photograph taken at the bay settles a claim; one taken on Thursday does not.
• For anything subject to examination or certification, check the certificate is present at receipt. Chasing a test certificate six weeks later has a much lower success rate than refusing the pallet.
• Spot-check the rest on a rota, so suppliers know that the checking is real without every delivery costing an hour.

The unit of issue trap

This deserves its own section because it causes drift that looks like theft and generates enormous amounts of pointless investigation.

A supplier sells a box of 100 washers as one line. Your store issues washers individually. If the receipt goes in as 1 and issues come out as 1, the balance goes negative almost immediately and everyone blames the counting. If it goes in as 100 sometimes and 1 other times, you get chaos with a plausible pattern.

Decide the stocking unit per item, once, and make the receipt convert into it. Never store two units for the same item and never let the receipt inherit whatever the supplier happened to use on the invoice.

Why booking in later never works

The pallet arrives at 11am and gets booked in at 4pm, or on Monday. In between, three things have happened: somebody has taken from it, because it is there and they need it; the paperwork has moved; and the person who received it has answered forty other questions.

The result is a receipt recorded from memory and paperwork rather than from the goods, which is precisely the failure the whole process exists to prevent. Worse, the items taken in between were taken from stock that did not officially exist yet, so those issues either fail or get recorded against a negative balance.

The practical fix is not exhortation. It is making the booking-in step short enough to do at the bay — scan, confirm quantity, done — and having somewhere to physically put unbooked goods so that "not yet received" is a place rather than a state of mind.

Discrepancies: record them, do not resolve them quietly

When the count does not match the note, the temptation is to book what arrived and move on. It gets the store working and it destroys the only evidence you have.

1. Book what physically arrived. The stock record must describe reality, always, even while a claim is open.
2. Record the difference against the delivery as a discrepancy, with the reason and a photograph if relevant.
3. Raise it with the supplier the same day, because most supply agreements have a notification window and it is shorter than you think.
4. Keep the history when the credit or the replacement arrives, rather than editing the original receipt to make it look correct.

Do that for a quarter and you get something more valuable than any individual claim: a per-supplier discrepancy rate. That number changes commercial conversations, because "you are short about four percent of the time" is a fact and "we always seem to have trouble with you" is an opinion.

Nilstock records a receipt as a ledger entry with its own history rather than as an edit to a balance, holds a stocking unit per item so a box of 100 cannot be received as 1, and keeps discrepancies attached to the delivery that caused them. See the feature list for how receipts and corrections are recorded. The counting side is in cycle counting, and if your balances are already untrustworthy, when a stores spreadsheet stops working is the place to start.