Standard Procurement Workflow

What is the difference between a goods received note and a purchase invoice? Standard procurement workflow

“What is the difference between a goods received note and a purchase invoice?” In the standard flow the goods received note (Purchase GRN) only records that the goods arrived and were counted — it moves no stock and posts nothing — while the purchase invoice is the supplier’s bill, and it is the document that books the stock into your branch and the money you owe into your ledger. (A second pair of documents books the stock at receipt instead; the warning under Four documents below says when to choose it.)

You are the person who buys stock for a retail group, or the accounts-payable clerk who pays for it, and you want one order to travel cleanly from “we need 200 more of these” to “the supplier is paid and the ledger balances”. By the end of this guide you will have raised a purchase order, received the goods against it, booked the supplier’s bill on top of the receipt, and settled it — and you will know exactly which of those four documents moves your stock and posts to your accounts. Set aside about 30 minutes for your first run through; after that each document takes a couple of minutes.

One order, at a glance

Check Before you start, then raise the purchase order (Step 1) and, if your company uses approvals, get it approved (Step 2).
Finalise and send the order (Step 3). With approvals on, the first approval has already finalised it.
Receive the goods on a Purchase GRN knocked off the order before its first Save, which hides the knock-off panels (Step 4). The GRN records the count and moves no stock.
Book the supplier’s invoice knocked off the GRN (Step 5). If your Knock Off Configuration generates the invoice when the GRN goes FINAL, open that one instead of creating a second, or you bill the goods twice. This is the document that books the stock and what you owe. Stay on one receipt pair: a plain GRN with a Purchase Invoice No Stock In, or a GRN Stock In with a full Purchase Invoice, counts stock never or twice (the warning below).
Pay the supplier with a payment voucher (Step 6).

    flowchart LR
  PO["Purchase Order<br/>moves no stock · posts nothing"] -->|"FINAL"| OQ["Open queue<br/>lines still outstanding"]
  OQ -->|"knock off"| GRN["Purchase GRN<br/>records the count<br/>moves no stock · posts nothing"]
  GRN -->|"knock off"| PI["<b>Purchase Invoice</b><br/><b>stock in · journal · what you owe</b>"]
  PI -->|"contra"| PV["Payment Voucher<br/>money out · creditor journal · cashbook"]
  PI -.->|"one invoice"| PT["Payment tab<br/>on the invoice"]

The order runs across four pages: Step 1 is on this one, Steps 2 and 3 are on Approve and send the order, Step 4 on Receive the goods, and Steps 5 and 6 on Book the invoice and pay.

Meet GadgetSphere

GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd sells consumer electronics from 22 branches across Klang Valley, Penang, Johor Bahru, Kota Kinabalu and Kuching. Buying is centralised: head office raises the purchase orders, the branch or the fulfilment centre receives the goods, and accounts payable in head office books the bills. Roughly 2,100 supplier invoices a month come through this flow from authorised distributors and accessory wholesalers.

The order we will follow is a straightforward one: 200 units of a mid-range wireless earbud model at RM 128 each from an accessory wholesaler, delivered to branch GS-KV-01, on 30-day terms. RM 25,600 before tax.

Four documents, and what each one actually does

BigLedger gives each document type a quantity signum and an amount signum — a plus one, a minus one or a zero that tells the engine whether finalising the document should move stock and whether it should post to the General Ledger. You never see these numbers on screen, but they decide everything, so it is worth knowing them for the four documents you are about to create (Purchasing core concepts §2 has every purchase document’s pair):

Document	Moves stock?	Posts to the ledger?	What it is really for
Purchase Order	No	No	Your commitment to buy. Finalising it puts its lines into an open queue so later documents can pull them in.
Purchase GRN	No	No	The record that goods physically arrived and were counted. It knocks the order down and queues itself for the invoice.
Purchase Invoice	Yes, stock in	Yes	The supplier’s bill. This is the document that books the stock and creates the money you owe.
Payment Voucher	No	Yes	The money leaving your bank.

Three more terms you will meet:

Knock off — pulling a finished document’s lines into the next document, so BigLedger knows the 200 units on the invoice are the same 200 units on the order. The tab is literally called KO For. Once a source document is fully knocked off it stops appearing in the picker.
FINAL — the button that commits a document. Before FINAL a document is a draft you can edit freely and it has done nothing at all. After FINAL it is locked, and whatever posting it was going to do is queued and, normally, done within moments. There is no un-FINAL; the reverse of FINAL is VOID.
The open queue — the list of “still outstanding” lines that FINAL creates. An order that has been half received still has half its quantity sitting in the queue. This is what makes partial deliveries work without any special handling.

Do not mix the two receipt paths. This guide follows the simpler of the two, Purchase GRN → Purchase Invoice: the GRN posts nothing, and the invoice books the stock and the liability together, so nothing hits your accounts until the bill does. The other pair, Purchase GRN Stock In → Purchase Invoice No Stock In, books the stock the moment goods land and leaves the invoice only the money.

Crossing them — a GRN Stock In followed by a full Purchase Invoice, or a plain GRN followed by a Purchase Invoice No Stock In — counts your stock twice or never. Pick one pair per company and stay in it (Purchasing core concepts §3 explains both pairs, the accrual the second one posts, and when it is worth choosing).

Before you start

The supplier exists as an entity, with the AR/AP type set. The type decides which creditor account the invoice credits; with no default GL code for it the invoice still goes FINAL and its posting job fails — see Step 5.
The items exist in Doc Item Maintenance, with the unit of measure you buy in.
Your company’s default GL codes are linked — at minimum PURCHASE, INPUT_TAX and the creditor account for your supplier’s AR/AP type. This is the single most common reason a first purchase invoice ends up FINAL with no journal behind it.
Tax codes are configured if you are SST-registered. GadgetSphere is, at 6%.
The fiscal period you are posting into is open. A month locked at LOCK_TXN or LOCK_ALL rejects the invoice at FINAL — the one error in this guide that actually stops the button. LOCK_GL does not: it stops manual journals only.
Your company’s Knock Off Configuration has the two rows this chain needs — Purchase Order → Purchase GRN and Purchase GRN → Purchase Invoice (Organisation > Company > Knock Off Configuration). Without them FINAL succeeds and the next document cannot find the one before it.
You have create and update permission (update is what Finalise checks; who can finalise) on INTERNAL_PURCHASE_ORDER, INTERNAL_PURCHASE_GOODS_RECEIVED_NOTE and INTERNAL_PURCHASE_INVOICE. In a normal setup these are three different people.
Optionally, approval settings on the purchase order. Skip this on your first run; it is covered in Step 2.

Step 1: Raise the purchase order

Purchasing > Purchase Order (Internal) > Purchase Order > Create

Open the Purchase Order (Internal) applet and click Create. The form opens on the Main Details tab with the branch and location pre-filled from your defaults; set them if they are blank — GS-KV-01 for our order, since that branch is taking delivery. Set the transaction date and, if you use it, the reference number your buyers recognise.

Move to the Account tab and pick the supplier. If your buyers are allowed to create suppliers on the fly the picker offers an inline create; most GadgetSphere branches have that switched off deliberately, so an unknown supplier means a call to master data first.

On the Lines tab, add the item and enter 200 as the quantity. The unit price fills itself from whichever pricing scheme is linked to the branch or to your role; override it to RM 128 if the negotiated price differs from the scheme. Watch the tax column — with a 6% SST code the line shows RM 25,600 net and RM 1,536 tax.

Watch out for: if the item picker shows nothing, the item may be a GL-code item type that your applet settings deliberately exclude from purchase lines, or it may not be linked to the company you selected.

Leave the header’s Group Discount boxes empty and give any discount on the lines: on a purchase order they can post a journal at FINAL (Step 3 says why).

If you are buying against a requisition, a supplier quotation or a blanket order rather than from scratch, use the KO For tab instead of typing lines: pick the source document and its lines come across with their quantities and prices intact.

Click SAVE. You now have a draft with a document number. Nothing has been committed, nothing has been sent, and you can still change every field.

Next: Steps 2 and 3, approve and send the order.

Steps 2 to 6, in brief

Step 2: Get the order approved — only if you have set approvals up

Approvals in BigLedger are off until someone configures them, and even with one configured a purchase order can still be finalised by hand while a request sits pending (Step 2).

Step 3: Finalise and send the order

Click FINAL: the order locks, its units enter the open queue when your Knock Off Configuration has the Purchase Order → Purchase GRN row, and nothing posts to stock (nor to the ledger, unless the header Group Discount is used), because a purchase order is a promise, not a transaction (Step 3).

Step 4: Receive the goods

Count the delivery before you touch BigLedger, then record it on a Purchase GRN knocked off the order before its first Save. The GRN records the count and moves no stock (Step 4).

Step 5: Book the supplier’s invoice

The purchase invoice, knocked off the GRN, is the document that books the stock and what you owe. Give it the date on the supplier’s invoice, not today, and set that date again after the knock-off, which stamps today’s date over it; check the price before FINAL (Step 5).

Step 6: Pay the supplier

Settle one invoice from its Payment tab, or several in one Payment Voucher (Internal) contra-linked to the invoices it pays (Step 6).

What success looks like

Thirty seconds, four checks:

Open the purchase order. Its lines should show no remaining open quantity — the GRN and the invoice have consumed it. If you receive in stages, the balance you have not received yet is what should be left.
Open Stock Availability for the item at GS-KV-01. The 200 units are in the on-hand balance, and the GRN quantity figure has dropped back — the receipt is no longer waiting to be invoiced.
Open the invoice’s Posting tab. Journal and Inventory both posted. TraceDocument shows the journal rows.
Open the supplier’s account. If you have paid, the invoice is settled and the outstanding balance is nil. If you have not, it sits in payables at its transaction date — there is no due date on a purchase invoice, so age it against the supplier’s terms yourself.

If all four are true, the order is complete and your accounts, your stock and your supplier’s ledger agree.

Common mistakes

Each part’s mistakes are on its page:

Approving and sending (Steps 2 and 3): assuming the approval workflow is stopping anything.
Receiving (Step 4): expecting the GRN to move stock; mixing the two receipt paths, and what to do if a GRN Stock In has already been billed on a standard Purchase Invoice; receiving damaged goods into the GRN to sort out later; voiding a GRN without checking Doc Link.
Booking and paying (Steps 5 and 6): finalising the invoice before checking the price, including which adjusting note lowers what you owe; treating a FINAL invoice as a posted one.