Goods received note template, and the four fields auditors look for
A free printable GRN, what ISO 9001 expects a receiving record to show, and why the condition field matters more than the count.
In short
- A goods received note is your record, written by you. A packing slip is the supplier’s record, written by them. Copying the second onto the first defeats the entire purpose.
- The four fields that get checked in an audit: what was ordered, what was received, what condition it was in, and who says so.
- A GRN with a quantity but no condition field cannot support a damage claim later, and damage is the expensive kind of problem.
A goods received note: GRN, goods receipt note, receiving report, the trade cannot agree on a name: exists so that three people who were not standing at the bay can agree on what arrived. Purchasing needs it to decide whether to chase. Accounts needs it before releasing an invoice. An auditor needs it to believe either of them.
Goods received note
One per delivery. File it against the purchase order.
GRN no.
Date and time received
Supplier
Purchase order no.
Carrier
Delivery note / packing slip no.
Received at (dock, site)
Cartons / pallets received
| Item / SKU | Description | Qty ordered | Qty received | Condition | Variance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Damage, shortage or exception noted on carrier paperwork? (Y/N)
Checked by (print name)
Signature
Notes
The four fields that carry the weight
- 1What was ordered. The purchase order number and the ordered quantity, taken from your order rather than from the supplier’s paperwork. If those two numbers came from the same place, the document proves nothing.
- 2What was received. Your count. Not the packing slip figure, and not the packing slip figure with a tick beside it.
- 3What condition it was in. The field people skip, and the one that decides whether a claim survives. “Two cartons water stained, photographed” written at the bay is worth more than a memory of it three weeks later.
- 4Who says so. A named person, not a department. ISO 9001 talks about retaining evidence of who authorised release; in practice a name is also what stops a disputed delivery becoming a conversation about which of four people might have signed.
What an auditor is actually testing
Not your handwriting. They pick an invoice, and they follow it backwards: does a purchase order exist, does a receiving record exist, do the three quantities agree, and if they do not, is there a note explaining why and somebody who approved it. That is three-way matching, and the GRN is the leg of it that most small companies cannot produce on demand.
Put another way
If you keep nothing else, keep the GRN and keep it findable by purchase order number and by date. Those are the two ways somebody will come looking, months apart, for different reasons.
Variance, and why it gets its own column
A blank variance column on ten lines is a delivery that matched. One number in it is the only thing anybody needs to read. Merging it into a notes field means somebody has to read ten rows of prose to find out whether there is a problem, which means, in practice, that nobody reads it.
What the four kinds of variance mean and who to tell: the four ways a delivery goes wrong.
Sources
- 01ISO 9001:2015, clause 8.4: control of externally provided processes, products and services · International Organization for StandardizationThe standard is paywalled. Clause 8.4.2 asks you to define the verification you apply to what a supplier provides; 8.6 asks you to retain evidence of conformity and of who authorised release.
DockCount does this job on a phone at the bay: count a delivery against the order it was placed on, photograph anything wrong, and the record writes itself. receiving reports you can send to purchasing.