Getting new deliveries onto the till quantities

Goods received against a purchase order do not add stock in Achekam today. How a shop gets a delivery onto its till quantities the same day.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 4 min read · For Retail businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

The supplier's truck pulls up at the back door on Tuesday morning with forty cartons of school shoes, two weeks before term starts. Your receiving clerk checks them off against the purchase order, records the delivery, and the shoes go onto the shelves by lunchtime. At two o'clock a cashier scans a pair and the till says there are none in stock.

Nothing went wrong at the back door. In Achekam today, recording goods received against a purchase order does not add stock. The delivery and the till's quantities are two separate records, and until something connects them, the till does not know the shoes have arrived. This article explains why, and gives a receiving routine that gets new stock onto the till the same day.

What a delivery records today: the goods-received record

Deliveries are recorded against a purchase order line by line, including part deliveries, and a goods-received record is kept. That record is valuable: it is your proof of what arrived, when, and against which order, and it is what the supplier's invoice is later matched to.

What it does not do is move stock. The quantity on hand at your shop's location stays exactly where it was before the truck arrived.

Why the till's stock does not rise when goods arrive

A till sale takes the sold quantity off stock at the till's location in the same step, and it refuses to go below nothing unless the business allows negative stock. So the till reads its quantities from the location's records, and the delivery never reached those records.

There are three ways a shop discovers this:

• The till refuses to sell an item that is plainly on the shelf.
• The shop has switched on negative stock, so the till sells happily, and quantities drift further below reality with every sale.
• A stock count turns up large surpluses on items that were recently delivered.

The value side has a related gap. Stock counts, wastage, transfers and opening quantities do not post to the general ledger; only till sales and till returns move the inventory account. So the cost of the delivery reaches your books through the supplier's bill, not through the goods-received record or a count.

Using a count to set the location's quantity after receiving

Until goods received create stock movements, the dependable way to get a delivery onto the till is a count. With the Warehousing add-on, a stock count sets a location's quantity to what was counted and records the difference as an adjustment.

For a delivery, count only the products that arrived, at the location where they were put away, straight after receiving and before the shop gets busy:

1. Receive the delivery against the purchase order as usual.
2. Put the goods away at the location the till sells from.
3. Count those products on the shelf, including what was there before, and record the count.
4. The location's quantity now matches the shelf, and the till can sell.

The adjustment the count records will include the delivered quantity. Note on the count that it follows a delivery, with the purchase order number, so nobody later mistakes the adjustment for a stock gain. Counting is covered in detail in running a stock take.

The Procurement tab inside Commerce that saves nothing

Shops looking for a quicker route often find the Procurement tab inside the commerce screens, with its own goods-received button. Do not use it. It creates purchase orders only in the browser, with an invented supplier and 15% VAT, and its goods-received button changes stock only on the screen. Nothing it records reaches the server.

Use the Procurement area in the main menu instead. There, a purchase order is raised from the selected quotation of an approved requisition, the person who raised it cannot approve it, and an approved order can be cancelled with a reason. That is where the goods-received record lives.

Matching the supplier's invoice to the order and the delivery

When the supplier's invoice arrives, it is recorded against the order and matched with what was ordered and what arrived. If the price or the quantity differs, the invoice is held until someone writes a resolution note.

This is where a careful goods-received record pays off. If the supplier invoices forty cartons and you received thirty-eight, the match holds the invoice and someone has to resolve it, rather than the shop paying for two cartons it never had. The same discipline in a factory setting is explained in the three-way match.

A receiving routine for the back door

A good routine connects all of this in the order things happen:

The signed delivery note is the document that settles arguments later. DP World's explainer on what a proof of delivery is describes what it records, including the recipient, the time and the condition of the goods, and why it matters for billing and disputes. Write any damage or shortage on the note before you sign it, not after the driver has gone. Builders face the same problem on site; see recording site deliveries.

Walk your next delivery through this routine from truck to till, and time how long the count step takes. That tells you whether one person can do it on busy delivery mornings.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.