A delivery note (also called a goods receipt note or GRN) is a document issued by a supplier at the time of physical delivery. It lists the items delivered, quantities, and references, and serves as the buyer's acknowledgment that the goods or services described have been received.
In a standard procurement workflow, the delivery note is the critical link between what was ordered (the purchase order) and what was invoiced (the supplier invoice). Without it, there is no way to verify that a payment corresponds to a real, complete, and compliant delivery.
This is exactly what makes delivery note reconciliation one of the highest-risk steps in accounts payable. In practice, most finance teams never systematically cross-reference all three documents. The purchase order sits in the ERP. The delivery note is signed by a warehouse team or a restaurant manager, often on paper, sometimes never digitized. The invoice arrives by email and gets processed without anyone checking whether the delivered quantities match what was ordered and billed.
The consequences are direct: duplicate billing, quantity overcharges, invoices for goods that were partially delivered or returned, all going undetected until an audit, a supplier dispute, or a manual spot-check.
3-way matching is the automated answer to this structural gap. Phacet cross-references the purchase order, the delivery note, and the supplier invoice simultaneously, flagging any discrepancy in quantity, price, or reference before payment is approved. This pre-payment control applies to 100% of invoices, not just sampled ones.
For food & beverage operators and retail groups managing high-volume supplier flows, automating delivery note reconciliation is the fastest path to eliminating undetected overpayments, and to building a procurement process that actually holds at scale.
