A delivery note is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the only evidence of what left you and what the customer received — and the argument it prevents is the one about a missing item three weeks later.
A delivery note travels with goods and lists what is in the consignment. The customer checks it against what arrived, signs or acknowledges it, and both sides keep a copy. It is a small document with one large function: it is the record that settles disagreements about quantity, condition and date, which are the disagreements that otherwise turn into unpaid invoices.
It is deliberately not an invoice. A delivery note says what was supplied and normally carries no prices; the invoice says what is owed. Merging them is common in small businesses and causes two problems — the warehouse sees your margins, and the accounting record ends up dependent on a piece of paper that travelled in a van.
The match between delivery note and invoice is the control that catches most billing errors before the customer does. Invoicing what was ordered rather than what was delivered produces exactly one kind of message — an item was missing and you have charged for it — and that message costs you the payment date on the whole invoice, not just the disputed line.
A signature on receipt is what makes the delivery note useful in a dispute, and it is increasingly captured on a screen rather than paper. Either works. What does not work is a note left in the box and never returned, which is a packing list rather than a delivery note — useful for the person unpacking, useless as evidence. If your carrier will not collect a signature, the fallback is a photograph of the delivered consignment with a timestamp, kept with the order.
The terms overlap and are used interchangeably in much of the world. Where they are distinguished, a packing slip is inside the parcel and tells the recipient what should be in it, while a delivery note is the document handed over and signed on receipt. Small businesses generally need one document that does both, and the practical question is whether somebody acknowledged receipt rather than what the form is called.
Ettex Invoices produces delivery notes from the same order records as the invoice, so quantities delivered and quantities billed come from one place rather than two, and the signed copy attaches to the order. The stock side of the same movement sits in inventory management.
The limits: there is no carrier integration, no label printing, no proof-of-delivery capture from a courier network and no barcode scanning on receipt. The document and the record are ours; the van is not.
A document accompanying goods that lists what is in the consignment, checked and acknowledged by the recipient. It records what was supplied; the invoice records what is owed.
Usually not. Most businesses omit them so that warehouse and delivery staff, and sometimes the customer's receiving team, do not see commercial terms.
They overlap and are often the same document. Where distinguished, a packing slip is inside the parcel and a delivery note is handed over and signed on receipt.
Note the refusal and the reason on your copy, and keep evidence of delivery — a timestamped photograph, a carrier record. An unacknowledged delivery is the weakest position in any later dispute.
Credit control is the set of decisions made before an invoice exists — who gets terms, how much, and what happens when they slip. Chasing is what you do when those decisions were never made.
AP automation is sold as one product, but it is four separate jobs with very different payback. Capture and matching are where the software earns its price; approval and payment are mostly a question of whether anyone wrote the rules down.
Dynamic pricing in retail means moving prices with demand, stock and competition. It reliably raises margin and just as reliably damages customer trust when the rules behind it are not defensible.