The gap between dispatched and accepted is where the money disappears.
A goods receipt note is the document a buyer issues on receiving goods, recording the quantity actually accepted. It is the reference point for detecting short supply — and the number that decides how much of your invoice ever gets paid.
Three quantities, and only one of them gets paid.
Every consignment carries three numbers. The quantity ordered, set by the purchase order the platform raises on you. The quantity dispatched, recorded when the shipment leaves. And the quantity accepted, recorded by the buyer on the GRN. Your invoice is raised against one of them. Your payment is settled against another.
Fill rate — the share of ordered quantity that was actually supplied and accepted — is the summary of that spread. Across live deployments SupplAi tracks a 93.5% average order fill rate. The remaining percentage is not a rounding error; it is revenue leakage, money a brand has earned but never collects, lost to short supplies, missing GRNs, invoice mismatches, unexplained deductions and unpaid or delayed invoices.
Most brands track orders and invoices. The real leakage starts after dispatch — when GRNs, accepted quantity, deductions, payments, invoices and portal data stop matching. It is one stage of the wider order-to-cash cycle, and the stage where the other stages get their answer.
Each one leaks differently.
Short supply, damages and missing GRNs are not the same problem, and they cannot be chased the same way. Treating them as one line in a spreadsheet is why they go unrecovered — and it is precisely the distinction an ERP does not draw.
Short supply
Short supply is the gap when the quantity accepted on the GRN is lower than the quantity ordered or dispatched. Supplied, accepted and invoiced quantities don't match — and no one notices. The loss is the difference between what left your warehouse and what the buyer agreed to pay for, and it only shows up if someone compares all three numbers against the same order.
Missing GRNs
Goods are dispatched, but GRNs are delayed, missing or never reconciled. This is a different kind of loss: there is no shortfall to argue about, there is simply no receipt against the consignment at all. Without a GRN, the invoice has nothing to settle against, and proof of delivery becomes the only evidence you have left.
Damages and deductions
A deduction note is a document from the buyer reducing the payable amount against an invoice, for reasons such as shortages, damages or claims. Damaged stock is received but not paid for in full. Booked as a smaller receipt and left unexamined, a deduction is indistinguishable from a legitimate price adjustment — which is exactly why deductions get missed.
Payment gaps
Invoice value and GRN value drift apart, creating hidden revenue gaps, and payments end up overdue, partial, or never mapped back to the right invoice. A payment that is short by the value of a disputed GRN line is not a payment problem — it is a reconciliation problem arriving late.
What reconciliation actually involves.
GRN reconciliation is included from the Starter plan onward, as part of the core order-to-cash workflow. This is the work it does.
Capture the three quantities
Ordered quantity from the PO, dispatched quantity from shipment tracking, accepted quantity from the GRN. Reconciliation is impossible until all three sit against the same order.
Match GRN to dispatch and invoice
Goods receipt notes are matched against supplied and invoiced quantities to detect short supply and missing GRNs, rather than being filed as standalone documents.
Flag the exceptions
Every mismatch becomes a named exception with channel-level visibility, instead of a line buried in a monthly spreadsheet that nobody reads in time.
Attach the evidence
Proof of delivery confirms the shipment was delivered and is used as evidence in claims and recovery. The PO, invoice, POD and GRN travel together.
Tie deductions and payment advices back
Deduction notes are mapped to their underlying reasons, and payment advices — the remittance statements explaining which invoices a payment covers and what has been deducted — are matched back to invoices.
Turn the gap into a recovery action
What remains unexplained becomes an evidence-backed recovery action with alerts and follow-ups, plus a weekly stuck revenue report.
Where a GRN gap turns into an unpaid invoice.
A GRN shortfall rarely arrives labelled as one. It arrives weeks later as a deduction note reducing the payable amount against an invoice, or as a payment advice showing an invoice settled for less than it was raised for. By then the consignment is old, the portal data has moved on, and the person who dispatched it has no reason to remember it.
Reconciliation closes that loop in the other direction. Deduction notes are mapped to their underlying reasons, and payment advices are matched back to invoices, so every reduction can be traced to a specific order, a specific GRN line and a specific piece of evidence. What cannot be traced is stuck revenue, and it gets a recovery action instead of a shrug. Payment advice reconciliation is part of the Scale plan, because it requires deeper ERP, banking and logistics integrations.
You might be sitting on revenue your team has already earned.
Share your PO, invoice, GRN, deduction and payment data. SupplAi runs a leakage audit and shows where money is stuck, delayed, deducted or missing.
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