The Document That Goes With the Goods

Two things leave your warehouse when you make a delivery: the goods, and a piece of paper. The paper is what settles the argument three weeks later about what was on the lorry.

We do not produce that piece of paper for a customer delivery. We do produce it for a movement between two of your own warehouses, which is the part worth explaining.

What exists on each side

An internal stock transfer is a document. It has a dispatch, a receipt, partial receipt, a recorded shortfall when less arrives than was sent, a return-to-source path with a reason, signature capture, and a PDF you can print and send with the vehicle.

A customer delivery is an invoice. It carries the warehouse and location the goods came from, which is genuinely useful and more than many systems record. What it does not have is a second document that goes with the goods, gets signed on arrival, and records what the person at the other end actually received.

Moving goods to your own depot produces a signed document. Moving them to a paying customer produces an invoice.

That asymmetry is not a considered decision. Transfers were built as a movement, invoices were built as a financial document, and nobody joined them.

What the missing document would have done

• Recorded a partial delivery. An invoice is for what was sold. Where you ship in two loads, there is no document representing the first one.
• Captured proof of receipt. A signature at the customer's gate, against a list. Available on internal transfers and not here.
• Separated dispatch from billing. These are different events on different days, and collapsing them means either you invoice before you ship or you ship without a document.
• Given the driver something that is not a price list. A delivery note conventionally carries quantities and not values, for good commercial reasons. An invoice carries both.
• Provided the reference a customer will quote. Delivery disputes are about a delivery, and the customer will reference the note they signed, not your invoice number.

The fourth is the one people are most surprised by. Sending a driver out with a document showing your prices to every customer on the route is not usually what anybody wants, and there is no priceless variant.

Why a Vietnamese distributor hits this daily

Because distribution here runs at high frequency into a long tail of small trade customers, often with a driver making many stops, and often with the person receiving the goods not being the person who ordered them.

That is the exact situation a delivery note exists for. The order was placed by one person, the goods are received by another, and the only thing connecting them is a document somebody signed at the point of handover.

It compounds with something already published: there is no sales order either, so the commitment that preceded the delivery has no document of its own — see There Is No Sales Order. The chain from promise to handover to bill has one document in it, and it is the bill.

What people actually do

1. Invoice on dispatch and send the invoice with the goods

   The common approach, and it works where you are content for the customer to see prices at the gate and where you never ship partially. Its weakness is that a delivery dispute becomes an invoice dispute, which drags the payment into it.

2. Use an internal transfer to a staging location, and its signed document

   A genuine workaround where you dispatch from a central store to a van or a route. You get the signature capture and the PDF, and the customer handover still has no document.

3. Keep a paper delivery book and reconcile weekly

   Unfashionable and entirely effective. The reconciliation is the part that matters: signed notes against invoices raised, weekly, with somebody named to do it.

4. Do not invoice before you dispatch

   Whatever else you decide. An invoice raised for goods that have not left is a receivable for a delivery that may not happen, and the credit exposure it creates is real.

Frequently asked questions