The goods and the bill arrive at different times, through different doors, and usually to different people. The cartons come to whoever is at the shutter. The bill comes by email, or in the same box, or three weeks later. Most small businesses have a careful record of the second and no record at all of the first.
What that costs
You ordered a hundred pieces. Ninety-two arrived. The bill says a hundred. Nobody compared the two, because the person who counted the cartons is not the person who paid the bill, and between them there was only a memory.
The same gap hides a quieter problem: the rate on the bill is not the rate you agreed when you placed the order. Not wrong enough to notice on one line, and repeated across every purchase for a year.
Why memory is the wrong tool here
Not because people are careless. Because the two events are separated by days, and the question that matters — does this bill match what actually turned up? — can only be answered by someone holding both facts at once. By the time the bill is in front of the person paying it, the cartons are opened, stacked and sold.
A goods receipt note is simply the first fact, written down at the moment it is still true.
Three numbers, not two
Once receiving is recorded separately, every purchase line carries three quantities instead of two, and each pair of them means something different:
- Ordered against Received — short supply. The vendor owes you goods, or the order should be closed at what actually came.
- Received against Billed — the expensive one. Billed above received means you are paying for stock that is not in your godown.
- Order rate against billed rate — price drift. The number you agreed and the number you are being charged, side by side.
This is what people mean by three-way matching. It sounds like a large-company process and it is, but the failure it prevents is not a large-company failure — it is an eight-piece shortfall on a Tuesday.
How this works in BizGST Pro
The Goods Receipt screen starts from an open purchase order. Pick the order and it lists every line with the quantity ordered, the quantity already received against it, and how much is still pending. You enter what physically arrived — line by line, part deliveries included.
Saving it creates a numbered goods receipt and adds the quantity to the order's received total. When every line on the order has been fully received, the order's status moves to received on its own; until then it stays open, so a part-delivered order stays visible instead of looking finished.
The second tab is the match. For each order it lays out ordered, received and billed per line, with the order rate against the rate on the purchase bill, so all three numbers are in one row rather than in three places.
It also moves your stock
Recording a receipt puts the quantity into stock as an inward movement, because that is the moment the goods actually became yours to sell. The purchase bill does not do this — the bill is a money document, and it may arrive long after the stock has started moving out again.
One limit worth knowing: this only happens for order lines linked to an item in your item list. A line typed in as free text is recorded on the receipt and counted in the match, but there is no item for the stock to move against, so stock stays where it was. If you want the receipt to update stock, the line has to point at a real item.
The habit that makes it work
Receive at the door, not at the desk. The record is worth having because it is made by the person who counted, while they are counting. Made later, from the bill, it is just the bill written out twice — and a copy of the bill can never disagree with the bill.