Sales orders, delivery challans and GRN: the paperwork between a deal and an invoice
In distribution, the invoice is the last step, not the first. An order is taken, goods are picked and sent on a challan, the supplier's goods arrive against a GRN — and every one of those is a document somebody will ask about later.
Businesses where goods and invoices move at different times
If you invoice at the moment of sale and nothing is ever ordered in advance, you do not need this module. Distribution is rarely like that. Goods go out on a challan and get invoiced later, orders sit open for a week, and the supplier delivers against a purchase order placed a fortnight ago.
- Distributors taking orders from salesmen or on the phone before dispatch
- Businesses sending goods on a delivery challan ahead of the invoice
- Companies receiving supplier goods against a GRN before the bill arrives
- Anyone who has had to prove what was delivered, when, and against which order
Four documents, one chain
Sales orders
What the customer asked for, recorded before anything moves, so an open order book exists rather than a pile of notes.
Purchase orders
What you asked the supplier for, which is what a GRN later gets checked against.
Delivery challans
Goods leaving the premises as a recorded movement, ahead of the invoice that follows.
GRN
Goods received recorded on arrival, so stock is live before the supplier's bill has been entered.
An order becoming an invoice
Order taken
The sales order records what was agreed, with the party as a real ledger account rather than a name on a note.
Goods picked
Stock is drawn from the right warehouse, with batch and expiry where Inventory Control is enabled.
Challan out
The delivery challan records the movement. Where the purchase bill has not yet been entered, batch and expiry can be keyed at that point rather than holding the dispatch.
Invoice raised
The invoice follows the goods, carrying the branch's tax treatment, and the receivable lands on the party's ledger.
Purchase orders and GRN
The incoming side runs the same way in reverse. A purchase order records what you asked for; the GRN records what turned up. Those two rarely match perfectly, and the gap between them — short delivery, substituted batch, wrong pack size — is exactly the thing that is impossible to argue about later if it was never written down.
Once the supplier's bill arrives it can be entered against what was received, and where AI Bill Scan is enabled it can be drafted from the bill itself and checked against the GRN rather than typed from scratch.
Knowing what you have promised
The quiet benefit of recording orders is not the document. It is that at any moment there is an answer to the question of what has been promised and not yet delivered, and what has been ordered and not yet arrived.
For a distributor those two numbers drive most of the week's decisions: what to pick today, what to chase from a supplier, and whether the reorder alert firing on an item is genuine or already covered by a purchase order in transit. Without an order book those questions get answered from memory, which works until the person with the memory is on leave.
Questions we get asked
Can we send goods before raising the invoice?
Yes. A delivery challan records the movement, and the invoice follows.
Does a delivery challan move stock?
Where Inventory Control is enabled, the goods leave the warehouse they were picked from, with batch and expiry where the item carries them.
Can batch and expiry be entered at dispatch?
Yes. Where goods are sold before the purchase bill has been entered, batch and expiry can be entered manually at the time of sale rather than holding up the dispatch.
What is the GRN for?
It records what actually arrived from the supplier, which is what the supplier's bill is later checked against.
Is this module separate from invoicing?
It is a separate add-on module, but it posts into the same ledger and the same stock as everything else.
Which plan includes it?
Orders & Goods Movement is included from the Gold plan. The pricing page sets out what each plan carries.
From order to invoice, on your data
Walk one of your own orders through picking, challan and invoice in a thirty-minute demo.
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