Receive purchased goods on a goods received note

Step 4 of the standard procurement workflow: record what actually arrived, knocked off the purchase order. It follows Steps 2 and 3, where the order was finalised and its lines entered the open queue. Check Before you start first: without the Purchase GRN → Purchase Invoice row, the invoice in Step 5 has nothing to knock off. The goods received note records the count and moves no stock; the invoice in Step 5 does that (Four documents, and what each one actually does). The running example is 200 wireless earbuds delivered to branch GS-KV-01 (Meet GadgetSphere).

1. Step 4: receive the goods.

Step 4: Receive the goods

Purchasing > Purchase GRN (Internal) > Internal Purchase GRN > Create

The delivery arrives at GS-KV-01. Count it before you touch BigLedger — the GRN should record what is actually on the floor, not what the delivery note claims.

Open the Purchase GRN (Internal) applet and click Create. Set the branch and location. There are three ways to bring in the order:

• Search Document → Search Purchase Order, which finds the finalised order and lets you add all its lines at once.
• KO For tab → Purchase Order, which knocks off the order’s lines.
• Import tab, which shows a grid of active purchase orders and their lines to pick from.

Use Search Document or KO For before your first Save. Both panels belong to a GRN that has never been saved: the first Save turns it into a draft and both disappear. If you saved first and they have gone, delete the empty draft and create the GRN again.

All three arrive at the same place: the Lines tab, showing the ordered quantity from the open queue alongside a received quantity you fill in.

If everything arrived, leave the quantities as they came across. If only 180 of the 200 arrived, change the received quantity to 180 — the remaining 20 stay in the open queue and a second GRN later will pick them up. If 10 arrived damaged, receive 170, not 180, and raise the shortfall with the supplier; goods you do not want to pay for should never enter a GRN.

For serialised items — phones, laptops, anything with an IMEI or a serial — open the line and enter or scan the serial numbers. The count must equal the line quantity. If your applet has serial validation on FINAL switched on, BigLedger re-checks this and refuses to finalise on a duplicate.

Record the supplier’s delivery note number in the header reference field so you can find this receipt from their paperwork later, and attach a scan of the delivery note on the Attachments tab.

Click SAVE, then FINAL.

What FINAL does here — and does not. It locks the GRN, closes off the ordered quantity against the purchase order, and — if the company’s Knock Off Configuration has the Purchase GRN → Purchase Invoice row — creates the open-queue rows the purchase invoice will consume. It writes no inventory transaction and no journal entry. Your stock balance at GS-KV-01 is unchanged.

One thing to check before Step 5: that same configuration row can be set to generate the purchase invoice automatically when the GRN goes FINAL, as a draft or already FINAL. If your company does that, the invoice exists the moment you finalise the GRN — open it from the Purchase Invoice listing rather than creating a second one, or you will bill the same goods twice.

You can see the receipt in Stock Availability, where the finalised-but-not-yet-invoiced quantity is reported separately as GRN quantity, and a saved draft appears as GRN draft quantity. That is the visibility the GRN gives you: the goods are here, they are counted, they are not yet stock.

Watch out for: there is no File Import in this applet and no approval menu — here a GRN cannot be approved and cannot be bulk-uploaded. Also, VOID on a GRN that an invoice has already knocked off is refused, and the message on this screen says only that the document has been knocked off with another document — it does not say which. To cancel the receipt you would have to void that invoice first, so open the Doc Link tab, find the invoice there, and look before you void anything.

What success looks like for this part

The Purchase GRN is FINAL, knocked off the purchase order, and records the quantity counted on the floor, not the delivery note’s. It has moved no stock and posted nothing. When the order is complete, run the whole order’s success check.

Common mistakes in this part

Expecting the GRN to move stock. It does not, and no setting on the GRN applet makes it. If your stock has to move on receipt, you need the Purchase GRN Stock In applet and its partner Purchase Invoice No Stock In — a different pair of documents, chosen once for the company. Symptom: goods have been received for days and Stock Availability still shows nothing on hand.

Mixing the two receipt paths. A GRN Stock In followed by a normal Purchase Invoice books the same goods into stock twice. A plain GRN followed by a Purchase Invoice No Stock In never books them at all. Both are silent — nothing warns you. Symptom: stock balances that drift steadily up or steadily down against physical counts.

If a GRN Stock In has already been billed on a standard Purchase Invoice, the accrual the receipt raised is never reversed either — only a No Stock In invoice knocked off the receipt reverses it — so the receipt and the bill both stay open on the Outstanding Document Report. A plain GRN billed on a No Stock In invoice still posts the accrual reversal, because it is linked to an earlier document, so two not-invoiced accounts carry balances that no receipt raised. And on the Stock In pair the Purchase Report shows every No Stock In invoice as zeros — quantity, amount and cost — while the ledger carries it in full, so read purchases on that pair from the ledger. There are two ways out of the double count, and which one a company takes is its accountant’s call: void the standard invoice and key a No Stock In invoice knocked off the receipt (stock and the accrual come right; VOID is limited as described under Finalising the invoice before checking the price), or leave both documents and exclude GRN Stock In from the Outstanding Document Report — the payment run reads right, but the stock stays counted twice, the accrual stays standing, and you lose the report’s list of receipts not yet billed.

Receiving damaged goods into the GRN “to sort out later”. You will pay for them. Receive only the quantity you are willing to be billed for; leave the rest in the open queue and let the supplier send a replacement or a credit note.

Voiding a GRN without checking Doc Link. If an invoice has already knocked the receipt off, the void is refused, and the message on this screen does not say which invoice — the GRN’s Doc Link tab does. Void that invoice first, and only if you mean to undo both. Look first.

Next: Steps 5 and 6, book the supplier’s invoice and pay it.

Related documentation

• Standard Procurement Workflow: the whole order, with its success check.
• Purchase GRN (Internal): the screen reference.
• Direct GRN Workflow: receiving without a purchase order.