What to keep in a receiving log, and for how long
A log is not a list of deliveries. It is the thing three different people will search, months apart, for three different reasons.
The short answer
A receiving log should record, for every delivery: the date and time, the supplier, the purchase order, each line with quantity ordered and received, condition and damage counts, anything unexpected, who received it, and any photographs. Keep it as long as you keep the invoices it supports, which for most businesses means several years.
Written by Hamza Rivera, founder, dockcount. How these are checked.
Most receiving logs are built to record deliveries. The good ones are built to be searched, which is a different requirement and produces a different log.
Three people will search it
| Who | When | What they search by |
|---|---|---|
| Purchasing | The same day | Purchase order, or supplier |
| Accounts | Weeks later, when an invoice arrives | Order number, invoice date, supplier |
| Whoever is chasing a fault | Months later | Part number, or batch |
A log organised only by date serves the first of those and fails the other two. That is the single most common reason a log gets abandoned: it was fine to write and useless to read.
What each entry needs
- When it arrived, to the hour. Two deliveries from one supplier on one day are otherwise indistinguishable.
- The supplier and the purchase order it was against.
- Every line: part number, ordered, received, damaged.
- Anything delivered that was not on the order.
- Who received it, by name, because in three months nobody will remember.
- Photographs of damage, attached to the line rather than the delivery.
- Free text for the thing that does not fit any of the above, because there is always one.
Worth knowing
Damaged has to be its own number. “40 received, 3 damaged” and “37 received” are different facts and lead to different conversations with a supplier.
How long to keep it
The practical answer is: as long as the invoice it supports. Retention periods for accounting records vary by country and by what you sell, and several years is the normal range. If your goods carry traceability requirements, the batch records usually have to outlive the accounting ones.
Check what applies to your business rather than taking a number from a website, this one included. The habit worth keeping regardless is not deleting anything with a photograph attached to it.
Paper, spreadsheet, system
All three work. What decides it is how many people receive and how often somebody needs to find one delivery among hundreds. One person, ten deliveries a week, a notebook is fine. Three people across two doors, it stops being fine quite suddenly.
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. A receiving log you can search.