One document answers "what turned up", the other answers "what do I pay". Treating them as the same thing is how a shop ends up paying for units that never came out of the carton.
What each one says
The delivery note lists items, quantities and carton counts, and it travels with the shipment. Prices are often absent from it entirely. The invoice lists prices, discounts, tax and due dates, and in wholesale fashion it commonly arrives days or weeks after the goods, covering several deliveries at once.
| Delivery note | Invoice | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | What was shipped | What you owe |
| Arrives | With the goods | Later, often batched |
| Always shows | Items, quantities, cartons | Prices, tax, terms |
| Used for | Checking the delivery | Paying and accounting |
Why order, delivery note and invoice do not match
Suppliers ship what they have. A season order for 12 units of a style can arrive as 9, with three sizes cancelled because the production run came up short. The delivery note reflects reality; the order reflects intent. Then the invoice is built from the delivery notes, so an error in one propagates into the amount you are asked to pay.
Discounts widen the gap further: an order at list price becomes an invoice with a season discount, and reconciling the two means comparing unit costs, not totals.
Why goods-in has to reconcile all three
Checking the delivery against the delivery note alone tells you the carton was packed as stated. It does not tell you whether you got what you bought, or whether the price on the invoice is the price you agreed. The only check that catches all of it compares three things per variant: ordered, received, billed. Short deliveries, over-deliveries and price differences all surface at once, while there is still time to raise them.
How Agilo handles it
Agilo accepts the order, the delivery note and the invoice for the same shipment, in PDF including scans, CSV or Excel, and its AI reconciles them into a single load rather than three unrelated uploads. Each variant line carries what was ordered, what arrived and the cost that was billed, so a shortage or a price difference is visible per size and color before the load is closed. Only the received quantities move into inventory.