Purchasing & Suppliers
Goods receipts, batches and three-way matching
Why receiving is its own step, and how matching stops you paying for what you did not get.
1 min read
Receiving is deliberately separate from ordering and from being invoiced, because those three things routinely disagree — and the disagreement is where money is lost.
Recording a receipt
- Open the purchase order the delivery relates to, or record an ad-hoc receipt if there was no order.
- Enter what actually arrived, line by line. It will not assume you received what you ordered.
- Capture batch or lot numbers and expiry dates where your trade needs them.
- Save. Stock goes up immediately, and the purchase order updates to received or partly received.
Three-way matching
When the supplier's invoice arrives, MerxumOS compares three things: what you ordered, what you received, and what you are being billed for. A bill that does not agree with the delivery is flagged rather than quietly paid — which is the single most common way small businesses overpay suppliers.
Tip — Capture expiry at the moment of receipt. It is the one time the information is physically in front of you on the box, and batch tracking cannot work without it.
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