Goods receipt software that counts what arrived before anything is owed.

Goods receipt software records the delivery against the purchase order it fulfils, and in Bollard that record holds three numbers on each line: received, accepted and rejected. Together they make the goods received note that stock and invoice matching rely on.

The gap between received and accepted is the important one. A pallet can arrive complete and still contain a damaged case. If only the received quantity is recorded, the damaged case gets counted, stocked and paid for. Recording acceptance separately means the organisation owes only for what it agreed to keep.

A partial delivery is received for the quantities that came, and the purchase order keeps the balance open for the rest. The store can receive the remainder against the same PO when it arrives.

Short shipments are a frequent reason an invoice fails a match, because a supplier may invoice the full order after delivering part of it. Closing a PO on a short shipment hides what the supplier still owes. Keeping the balance open keeps the gap visible, and the invoice is matched against what has been accepted so far.

Rejected quantities are recorded on the line they arrived on, and they never become billable. When the invoice comes in, the three-way match uses accepted quantities only, so rejected stock is excluded automatically.

Nobody has to remember the damaged case when the invoice lands three weeks later. In the multi-unit dining configuration, this is how rejected perishables are kept off the invoice: a box of wilted romaine hearts turned away at the kitchen door stays off the bill.

Beyond quantities, receiving can capture the details a sector needs at the point of delivery. These are configurations of the same receiving screen, in the store's own terms, whether it is called a central pharmacy, an equipment yard or a central commissary.

Receiving sits between the purchase order and the three-way match, and it supplies the quantities the match depends on.

The step before is the PO. The receiver works from the order's lines, so they record against what was agreed instead of a delivery docket alone.

The step after is the three-way match. The invoice is compared with the PO's prices and the receipt's accepted quantities, line by line. A short or rejected delivery shows up as a quantity failure on the invoice, and payment waits until the invoice agrees.

On a spreadsheet, keeping rejected goods off the bill relies on someone noticing, and in a typical ERP it depends on how receiving was set up. Bollard records rejects per line at the dock and the match excludes them automatically.

Spreadsheet receiving also leaves stock figures behind reality, because a count goes in when someone gets to it and anyone can overwrite a cell. Inventory accuracy is a known weak point: one study across 37 stores of a single retailer found 65% of inventory records were wrong (DeHoratius and Raman, Management Science, 2008). Updating stock at the moment of acceptance removes one common source of that gap.