--- title: Over- and under-deliveries summary: > Record what actually arrived, never what was ordered. Receiving fewer units than ordered leaves the balance outstanding and keeps the purchase order open for the rest. Receiving more is allowed on purpose: the extra units are real, so they go on the books and raise what you owe. Neither case needs a correction, and neither is an error. type: concept group: receive step: 2 permission: null prerequisites: [] related: - /help/receive/receive-a-delivery - /help/receive/what-a-unit-costs - /help/store/the-stock-ledger last_updated: 2026-08-07 --- **A purchase order is a promise. A delivery is what turned up. They are allowed to disagree.** Suppliers ship short because a run underperformed. They ship long because a pallet fits 500 and you ordered 480. Both are ordinary, and a system that refuses to record them just teaches people to type the ordered number and sort it out later — which is how stock figures stop meaning anything. So Mossery takes one rule seriously: **enter the number you counted.** The paperwork bends around it. This page covers: - [Two ways a delivery differs from the order](#two-ways-a-delivery-differs-from-the-order) - [Under-delivery: the balance stays outstanding](#under-delivery-the-balance-stays-outstanding) - [Over-delivery: the extra units are real](#over-delivery-the-extra-units-are-real) - [What happens to the purchase order](#what-happens-to-the-purchase-order) - [When the difference is not a quantity](#when-the-difference-is-not-a-quantity) ## Two ways a delivery differs from the order Every line of a delivery shows you four numbers before you type anything. | Column | Meaning | | --- | --- | | Ordered | What the purchase order asked for | | Already received | What earlier deliveries against this order have brought in | | Outstanding | Ordered minus already received — what is still owed | | Receive now | What you are recording today. It starts at the outstanding figure. | Change the last one and a small hint appears under it — `+3 extra` or `-3 short` — so a difference is visible while you are still typing, not discovered a week later. Lines with nothing left outstanding show a **Fully received** badge instead of an input, and are left out of the submission entirely. That is the whole mechanism. There is no separate "report a shortage" screen and no over-delivery approval step. The variance *is* the number you entered. ## Under-delivery: the balance stays outstanding Enter the smaller number and submit as normal. Three things follow: - **The units that arrived go on the books immediately**, at the location you received into, exactly as a full delivery would. They are countable and sellable straight away. A short delivery is not a failed delivery. - **The order stays open for the difference.** The outstanding figure recalculates, and it is now what the supplier still owes you. - **The order stays on the to-receive worklist**, so the next box against it opens the same lines with the remaining quantities already filled in. You can receive against the same order as many times as it takes. Four part deliveries produce four separate records, each with its own date, its own delivery note number and its own ledger entries — which is what you want when someone asks in March when a particular batch actually landed. If the balance is never coming — the supplier discontinued it, or you agreed to settle short — do not fake a receipt to tidy the order up. Close the order instead. Closing says "nothing more is expected" while leaving the record honest about how many actually arrived. ## Over-delivery: the extra units are real Enter the larger number. The app will take it. Nothing caps the quantity at what was ordered, and that is a deliberate decision rather than a missing validation. The alternative is worse in every direction: refusing the extra would leave real units sitting in your building with no entry anywhere, and someone would eventually "fix" it with an adjustment that hides where the stock came from. So the extra behaves like any other received stock: - It posts to the ledger against this order, so its origin is traceable. - It becomes sellable with everything else in that delivery. - It is included when the delivery is costed, which means an over-delivery raises the value of the goods received and, usually, the amount you owe. That last point is the one to watch. Because unit cost is a moving average weighted by the quantity received, over-recording a delivery moves your cost figures as well as your stock figures. A miscount here is not a small inconvenience — it quietly reprices the product. Two practical notes. A line that already shows as fully received will not offer you an input, so a late extra box needs the order opened directly rather than picked off the worklist. And if the extra is something you intend to send back, do not receive it: units you will return should not enter stock and then leave it again. ## What happens to the purchase order The order's status is worked out from totals, not line by line. After each delivery is posted, the app adds up every line's ordered quantity and every line's received quantity across the whole order: - **Received in full or more** — the order moves to Received. - **Some but not all** — the order moves to Partial and stays available to receive against. - **Nothing yet** — the status is unchanged. The status only ever moves forward. An order already marked Received is not dragged back to Partial by later activity. There is a consequence worth knowing, because it surprises people. Since the comparison is on totals, **a big over-delivery on one line can carry the order to Received while another line is still short.** The headline says complete; the lines say otherwise. When you care about a specific product rather than the order as a whole, read the line, not the badge. Correcting a quantity you entered wrongly is a reversal, not a second delivery. Do not record a negative or a compensating receipt on top — reverse the whole delivery, then record it again with the right numbers. Both entries stay in the history, and the story reads correctly. A reversal is refused if the units have already been sold or moved on, because undoing it would drive that location below zero and describe movement that never happened. ## When the difference is not a quantity Not every mismatch is a bigger or smaller number. - **Damaged units.** Receive only what you would actually sell. Anything going back to the supplier should never enter stock in the first place. Note the damage on the delivery so the shortfall has an explanation attached. - **The wrong item.** Do not receive it against a line it does not match. The line codes are fixed by the order for exactly this reason — there is no free-form product search on a delivery. Record the lines that are correct and raise the mismatch with the supplier. - **Service lines.** Work like binding, die-cutting or foiling never enters stock, so those lines have no quantity to receive and no outstanding balance. They are settled on the order itself, and they are excluded from the counts that decide whether an order is receivable at all. - **Goods from an outsourced production run.** These arrive against the production run, not against the order that paid for the work. The order bought a service; the finished goods are a separate record. ## Explore **Recording a delivery.** The full click-through, including where the quantity and location are entered. [Learn more →](/help/receive/receive-a-delivery) **What a unit costs.** Received quantity is what the moving average is weighted by, so an over- or under-count moves the cost too. [Learn more →](/help/receive/what-a-unit-costs) **The stock ledger.** Every unit received writes a permanent entry, which is how a variance stays explainable months later. [Learn more →](/help/store/the-stock-ledger)