Documentation/ Document types/ Purchase delivery notes
Purchase delivery notes
A delivery note records what actually came through the door: which items, how many, and on what day. It is the document that later lets you check the supplier's invoice against what was really delivered.
On this page
The list
You find it under Documents → Purchases → Goods received notes, at
/documents/albaranesnext. It is the list you should start the upload from for this type.
What is extracted
| Block | Data |
|---|---|
| Issuer | The supplier delivering the goods, with their tax number. |
| Recipient | The company it is addressed to. |
| Identification | Delivery note number, document date and delivery date. |
| Delivery | Delivery address and postcode, number of parcels. |
| References | Order number and the supplier's own references. |
| Lines | Item, quantity, unit of measure and, where they are on it, price and discounts. |
Notes with no values on them
Plenty of suppliers send delivery notes with no amounts: they list what was delivered but do not price it, because the price is set on the invoice. That is perfectly normal and the document is processed just the same.
An unpriced delivery note is not an incomplete document: it brings what it is meant to bring, the items and the quantities. You approve it and consolidate it against its invoice without keying prices in by hand.
The practical upshot is that on an unpriced note the arithmetic checks do not apply: there is no net and no total to reconcile.
Price checking
When the note does carry prices, the system compares them with earlier deliveries of the same item from the same supplier. The list shows:
| Column | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Last price | The price recorded on the previous delivery of that item. |
| Change | The difference from that last price, as an amount and as a percentage. |
| Price alert | A flag according to how big the change is and which way it went. |
This is the feature that catches the rises nobody told you about, the ones that slip past when there are a lot of lines. If an item has no earlier deliveries there is nothing to compare against, and the column says so.
Consolidation with the invoice
The note and its invoice are tied together through consolidation, which compares what was delivered against what was billed, item by item.
For that to work, both documents have to be in: the note in its list and the invoice in its own. Uploading only one of the two gives it nothing to compare.
Received products
Delivery notes feed the Received products table, the view by item of everything that has come in. They are its only source: purchase invoices do not feed it.
Which is why, on accounts where product and price control come first, the advice is to upload documents as delivery notes even if they are transferred to invoices afterwards.
Sending it on
Delivery notes go to the ERP like any other type, with whatever each destination insists on. On some integrations the delivery note is precisely the document that moves the stock, while the invoice moves the accounts.