How to receive a purchase order in Shopify

A purchase order is a promise. You asked a supplier for sixty jackets, they said yes, and one Tuesday a van turns up. Receiving is the moment you check that promise against what is actually in the boxes, and then tell Shopify about it.

Get it right and your stock numbers hold. Get it wrong and you find out three weeks later, when a customer orders a jacket you do not have.

What receiving actually means in Shopify

Shopify does not have a purchase order feature in the core admin. It has inventory levels per location, and it has an API for changing them. Anything that looks like a purchase order comes from an app, from Shopify’s own Stocky if you use Shopify POS Pro, or from a spreadsheet somebody keeps.

So “receiving a purchase order” in Shopify means three things happening together:

1. You check what arrived against what you ordered.
2. You raise anything that is missing, damaged or extra.
3. You add the correct quantity to the correct location.

Most stores do the first step well, skip the second, and do the third late.

The three ways stores do it now

On paper

Someone prints the order, ticks the lines with a pen, and hands the sheet to whoever does the admin. It works until the sheet gets wet, or until the person with the pen is not the person with the laptop.

Paper has one real advantage: it never runs out of battery. It also has one fatal habit, which is being keyed in later, by someone who was not there.

In a spreadsheet

Better, because the numbers can be pasted into Shopify in a bulk edit. Worse, because a spreadsheet has no idea which location it is talking about, and it will happily let you type 600 where you meant 60.

Straight into Shopify

The most accurate, if you do it while unpacking. The problem is the admin was not built for a phone in a stockroom. You search for a product, scroll to a variant, adjust the number, then go back and do it again. Sixty times.

Why the count drifts

Every store we visit has the same four leaks.

The delivery note is trusted. The note says what the supplier meant to send. It is a packing list, not evidence. Count against your own purchase order.

Stock is booked in the next morning. Between the van arriving and the numbers going in, the store keeps selling. If two of those jackets sell before you book in sixty, your maths is now wrong in a way that is hard to unpick.

Part deliveries are closed off. A supplier sends forty of sixty and the order gets marked complete because the paperwork is tidier that way. The remaining twenty arrive on Friday and go in as a mystery.

Nobody records the shortage. The two missing jackets are noticed, mentioned, and forgotten. Most suppliers have a claim window of seven to fourteen days. After that you have paid for stock you never had.

A method that holds up

This works whether you use paper, a spreadsheet or an app.

1. Open the order first, then the boxes. Have the expected quantities in front of you before you see the delivery note.
2. Count into the order, one line at a time. Do not batch. A running count per line is what makes a shortage obvious.
3. Say what happened to every line. Matched, short, over, or damaged. A line with no result is a line nobody checked.
4. Book in on the day. Even a part delivery. Especially a part delivery.
5. Leave the order open until the last box. A purchase order should close because it is finished, not because it is Friday.
6. Photograph anything damaged before it moves. A photo taken next to the pallet is worth more than a description written on Monday.

Doing it with a barcode scanner

A scanner turns steps two and three into one action. You scan an item, the line goes up by one, and the count is on screen. There is no searching and no typing, which removes the two places where a keyed number goes wrong.

You do not need special hardware to start. A phone camera reads a retail barcode well enough for a small delivery. Past roughly fifty items in one go, a cheap Bluetooth scanner pays for itself in a week. It fires in about a tenth of a second and does not need a steady hand.

The thing to check before you buy any scanner is what your products actually carry. If half your range has no barcode in Shopify at all, scanning will stall on the first box. Our guide to barcode types for Shopify stores covers what to put in the barcode field and what to print yourself.

Short, over and damaged

Short. Receive what came. Leave the rest of the line open. Record the shortage against the order the same day and send it to the supplier with the order number.

Over. Receive the full amount that arrived, not the amount you ordered. Stock you have but have not counted is the worst kind of stock, because Shopify will not sell it and you have still paid for it. Flag the overage and agree what happens to it afterwards.

Damaged. Receive it, then adjust it out with a reason. That leaves a trail: sixty arrived, two were damaged, fifty-eight are sellable. Adjusting the receipt down to fifty-eight hides the damage from anyone who checks later.

Once the order is closed

Check three things before you walk away:

• The location is right. Stock received into the warehouse when it went to the shop floor is a problem that takes a stocktake to find.
• The order shows a result on every line.
• The variance list has gone to whoever talks to the supplier.

Stock accuracy is not one big job. It is this job, done the same way every time. If your numbers still drift after tightening receiving up, the next place to look is everything that happens after the boxes are empty, which we went through in why your Shopify stock count drifts.

Doing this with PLACEHOLDER

We built PLACEHOLDER because we kept watching this go wrong. You open the purchase order on a phone, scan what comes out of the box, and Shopify stock updates as you go. Part deliveries stay open, the variance list builds while you unpack, and scanning keeps working when the Wi-Fi does not.

It takes about four minutes to set up, and there is a free plan for stores that only take the odd delivery.