A GRN is written by whoever receives the delivery, not by the supplier. That distinction is the entire value of the document, and it is the part that gets lost when a site treats the supplier's delivery note as the record.
The supplier's delivery note says what they say they sent. The invoice says what they are charging for. The GRN says what a person on your site counted. When the three disagree, you have found something, and you have found it on the day, while the lorry is still there and the driver can be asked, rather than six weeks later when the only record is an invoice nobody can contest.
What a usable GRN carries
- Date and time, and the vehicle or driver, so a query has something to attach to.
- Supplier and their reference, so it can be matched to the invoice later.
- What was ordered, and what actually arrived, as two separate columns. If they are one column, nobody is counting. They are copying.
- Condition on arrival. Torn cement bags, rusted bars, sand with visible soil in it. A quality dispute raised on the day is a deduction. Raised next week it is an argument.
- Who received it, by name. Not "the site".
- Which element it is for, where that is knowable. This is the field that turns stock-keeping into cost control, because it is what lets delivered material be compared to the measured quantity in the bill of quantities.
- A photograph, which helps more than people expect and costs nothing.
The two rules that make it work
Count before the lorry leaves. A shortage found while the driver is standing there is settled in five minutes. A shortage found afterwards is your word against a signed delivery note, and the note has a signature on it.
Pay from the GRN, never from the delivery note or the invoice alone. Every recurring shortage on every site survives for the same reason: somebody is paying for what was ordered rather than for what came.
A worked example
The order is 200 bags of cement. The delivery note says 200. The storeman counts 188 and writes 188 on the GRN, photographs the stack, and has the driver initial the count.
The invoice arrives for 200. Accounts pays 188. The supplier either delivers twelve bags or credits them.
At KES 800 a bag that is KES 9,600 on one delivery. On a build taking forty deliveries, a site running GRNs and a site not running them do not have different rates of discrepancy. They have the same rate, and one of them notices.
Separation of duties
Do not make one person both the buyer and the counter. Not because anyone is assumed dishonest, but because the separation is what lets an honest person prove they were. A storeman who did not place the order and a buyer who did not count the delivery produce a record that either of them can stand behind.
On a small build where that is genuinely impossible, the fallback is the photograph and the driver's initial: a second party to the count who is not on your payroll.
What goes wrong
The GRN is filled in from the delivery note. This is the commonest failure and it converts the control into paperwork. If the two columns always agree exactly, nobody is counting.
Nothing is recorded against an element. A delivery logged only as a project total tells you what you spent and nothing about whether it was too much, because there is no measured expectation to compare it to.
Discrepancies are noted and never chased. A GRN that records a shortage and generates no credit note is a record of money lost rather than a control that saved it.