Delivery Notes

A delivery note travels with the goods so the customer can sign for what arrived. It carries no prices and does not touch your books until you invoice the delivery.

Raise a delivery note

1. Go to Sales > Delivery Notes and select New delivery note.
2. Select the customer. Deliver to is filled in from their billing address — change it to the site, yard or branch the goods are actually going to.
3. Add each line: the product, a description, the unit and the quantity. There are no prices on a delivery note.
4. Save the draft, then select Dispatch when the goods leave and print the note for the driver.
5. When it arrives, select Mark delivered and record who signed for it.

• A delivery note does not have to come from anything. There is no quote or order to raise first — create one whenever goods go out.
• It posts nothing to your ledger, creates no VAT, creates no debt and does not reduce your stock figure. All of that arrives when you invoice the delivery and issue that invoice.
• Delivery notes have their own DN number sequence, so they never use up an invoice number and leave a gap in your tax invoice numbering.
• Use Refused when a load comes back. It is the honest end for a delivery that never happened, and it takes the note off the list of deliveries waiting to be billed so nobody invoices it by mistake later.

Bill a month of deliveries on one invoice

You do not have to raise an invoice for every drop. Deliver through the month, then bill once. This is the reason delivery notes exist as their own document rather than as a printout of an invoice.

1. Go to Sales > Delivery Notes and select Not yet invoiced.
2. Deliveries are grouped by customer, oldest first, with an age on each one. Tick the deliveries you want on a single invoice.
3. Select Invoice selected. A draft invoice is created covering all of them.
4. Check the prices, then issue the invoice as you would any other.

• It creates a draft invoice, not an issued one. Nothing reaches your books or your VAT201 until you issue it yourself.
• Prices come from each product's current price at the moment you invoice, not from the day you delivered. That is deliberate: a price captured weeks earlier and applied silently at month-end is how you end up invoicing at last quarter's rates.
• Each delivery stays as its own line, naming its delivery note number and date. Three deliveries of the same product stay three lines, so your customer can tie the invoice back to the three signed notes on their desk.
• Once invoiced, a delivery note is locked and can no longer be edited or deleted, because it is the record of what the invoice was raised from.
• You cannot mix currencies on one invoice. If a customer has deliveries in two currencies you will be asked to invoice them separately.
• To bill a single delivery on its own, open the note and select Invoice this delivery.

Stock and delivery notes

Stock comes off when you issue the invoice, not when you dispatch the delivery note. If you deliver through the month and bill at month-end, your stock on hand reads slightly high during the month and corrects itself the moment you invoice. Your closing figures are never wrong.

Delivery note or pro forma?

A pro forma invoice is priced and goes *before* the supply, so the customer can pay a deposit or raise a purchase order against it. A delivery note has no prices and goes *with* the goods. They are not alternatives, and you may well use both on the same sale.