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Cases, eaches and the shortage that is not real

The order is in cases, the delivery note is in units, and the system now says you are a hundred and ninety short. Nobody is wrong and everybody is annoyed.

The short answer

A unit of measure mismatch happens when an order, a delivery and an invoice count the same goods in different units, such as cases against individual items. It produces shortages and overages that are arithmetic rather than real, and the fix is to decide which unit the record is kept in and convert everything to it at the point of counting.

Written by Hamza Rivera, founder, dockcount. How these are checked.

You order ten cases. Ten cases arrive. The person at the bay opens one, sees twenty bottles, and records two hundred. The order says ten. The record now shows an overage of a hundred and ninety, and everybody involved counted correctly.

A flat illustration showing one sealed case beside the same case cut open, revealing a grid of many small identical units packed inside it.
One object, two true answers. The argument is almost never really about the count.

Put another way

You ask for two dozen eggs and somebody hands you twenty-four eggs. Both of you are right and the shopping list still looks wrong.

Where it comes from

  • The order was raised in the supplier's selling unit and received in the unit you actually use.
  • The supplier changed their case pack and did not say. Twelve became ten and the part number stayed the same.
  • A mixed pallet where some lines are cases and some are singles, and nobody said which was which.
  • Weighed or cut goods, where the order is in metres or kilos and the delivery arrives as pieces.

Worth knowing

The case pack changing without the part number changing is the nastiest version, because every document still agrees with every other document and only the physical count disagrees.

Fixing it

  1. 1
    Pick one unit per line and write it on the order. The unit belongs to the line rather than to the supplier or the company, because one order can hold both.
  2. 2
    Convert at the bay, not afterwards. The person holding the goods knows how many are in the box. Somebody reconciling a spreadsheet next week does not.
  3. 3
    Record what you counted and what you converted it to. “10 cases of 20” survives a challenge. “200” does not.
  4. 4
    Check the pack size when a discrepancy is a clean multiple. A shortage that is exactly a twelfth or exactly ten times is almost never a real shortage.

The tell

Real shortages are untidy. You ordered a hundred and got ninety-seven. Unit mismatches are suspiciously round: exactly ten times, exactly a twelfth, exactly half. If the number is neat, check the pack size before you ring the supplier.

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. Why reading the slip does not fix this.

Read next

Purchase order, packing slip, invoice: which is whichThree documents describe one delivery, they are written by different people at different times, and only one of them is a request for money.What a goods received note is, and what it must containThe document that records what actually arrived. It is what lets finance pay an invoice, and it is usually the weakest piece of paper in the building.Advance shipping notices, and how much to trust oneA message that tells you a delivery is coming and what should be on it. Useful for planning the day. Still a claim by the supplier.