The pile on the counter
The truck arrives at half past eight. The driver unloads, the warehouse worker signs the delivery note (DDT) and keeps a copy, then puts it on the counter on top of yesterday's. Right now the goods have to be put away, and there is no time for the computer
Towards evening, or the next day, or on Monday if the week has been a heavy one, someone picks up the pile and starts posting. Open the screen, look up the supplier, look up the code, type the quantities, save, move on to the next note
In the meantime the warehouse in your system says one thing and the shelf says another
The problem is not the time it takes
The hours spent posting goods receipts can be counted, and they are real hours. But they are not the worst of the damage. The damage is the window in between, those hours or days when the goods are physically on site and the business software does not know it
Inside that window a salesperson tells a customer the item is not there, while it is sitting on a pallet ten meters away. Or purchasing reorders something that arrived this morning. Or the warehouse ships a piece the system does not have yet, and the stock figure drops below zero
Anyone who works in a warehouse knows the real consequence. After a while nobody trusts the stock figures on screen, people go and look with their own eyes, and from that moment the business software has become an archive instead of a tool
What an automation does instead of the pile
Posting an incoming delivery note is made of steps that repeat identically every time, and that is exactly the kind of work you can hand to a system that drives the business software you already use, opening the same screens a person would open
The document arrives as a PDF by email, or as XML, or as a scan. From there it pulls out the supplier, the number and date of the note, the codes and the quantities. Then it compares them against the order you placed, checks that the codes exist in your master data, and writes the goods receipt
The difference is that this happens at nine in the morning instead of seven in the evening, because the supplier's note often arrives by email before the truck has even opened its doors
The supplier's code is not your code
On the note the supplier writes AB-1200/N, and you call that same item VITE12X100. They are codes made up here to show the mechanism, and no machine can guess they are the same thing unless somebody has said so
It is solved with a conversion table, a match between the supplier's code and yours. You build it once for the codes you really buy, then update it whenever a new item comes in
It is dull work at the start, and there is no honest shortcut. But it is also the only genuinely manual part of the whole business, and once it is done it stays done
When it has to stop
An automatic goods receipt that guesses is worse than the pile on the counter. At least you know the pile is there, while a wrong figure inside your stock does not show until it does damage
So the rules are written the other way round. The system posts only when it is certain, and in every other case it stops and puts the note in a list for a person
It stops when the supplier's code has no match, when the quantity delivered is not the quantity ordered, when an item arrives that was not on the order, when the same note turns out to be posted already, when the document is unreadable or the layout has changed
Who decides what counts as doubtful
You set the tolerances. If a partial delivery is normal in your line of work the system accepts it and records it, and if one piece missing means a complaint, then it stops. That is a warehouse decision, not a technical one
The same goes for the step after it, the comparison between what you ordered, what arrived and what you are invoiced for, which only becomes possible if the goods receipt is in the system when it is needed, meaning not at the end of the week
Where to look to tell whether it makes sense
You need only a few things. How many notes arrive in a month, what form they arrive in, how many different suppliers there are, and whether the codes are already mapped somewhere or not
If there are five notes a month, leave it alone, you will never get back the time spent writing the rules. But if the pile on the counter is something you see every day, then it is worth a look inside