Delivery notes and LPOs into one spreadsheet.
The LPO is a PDF from the accounts system. The delivery note is a photo the site supervisor sent on WhatsApp, signed, with a quantity crossed out and corrected by hand. Someone has to line them up before the invoice is paid. That someone should not be retyping.
The short answer
Both documents go into Saff as they are, the LPO as a PDF and the delivery note as a photo, against one table: supplier, LPO number, item, unit, quantity ordered, quantity received, received by, date. Each document fills the columns it has. Sort by LPO number and the ordered and received rows sit together, with the difference in plain sight.
Where the delivery note is hard to read, a crossed-out quantity, a signature over the item code, a photo taken in the sun, the value is flagged and the photo shown beside it. That is where a person looks. Everything else is already in the sheet.
Why this is retyped today
Because the two documents never look alike. The LPO is a clean PDF with a grid; a converter handles it, more or less. The delivery note is the supplier's form, a different layout for every supplier, on carbon paper, photographed at an angle, with the quantity received written by hand and the driver's signature across the bottom. A converter returns nothing usable from that, so the store clerk types it into the sheet from the picture.
It is also retyped because the sheet is the point. The three-way match, ordered versus delivered versus invoiced, is how a contracting or trading company stops paying for what did not arrive, and it lives in a spreadsheet. Nobody is going to change the sheet. The question is how the numbers get into it.
The cost is not the typing time, though there is plenty of that. It is that the retyping happens at month end, in a batch, by someone who was not on site, so a quantity that should have been queried on the day is queried three weeks later, if it is queried at all.
| Column | Why it is collected | Where it goes wrong on the document |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier | Which account, which contact to call. | Trading name on the delivery note, legal name on the LPO. |
| LPO number | The key that lines the two documents up. | Handwritten on the delivery note, sometimes the quotation number instead. |
| Item and unit | What was ordered, in what measure. | Bags on the LPO, tonnes on the delivery note. |
| Quantity ordered | From the LPO. | Partial deliveries against one LPO across several notes. |
| Quantity received | From the signed delivery note. | Handwritten, corrected, or a tick that means 'as above'. |
| Received by and date | Who signed for it and when. | A signature with no printed name; a date in the wrong format. |
How Saff builds the sheet
Create the table once with the columns above, or your own version of them. Upload the LPOs from accounts as PDFs and the delivery notes as they arrive, photos from the WhatsApp group, scans from the store, a batch at a time or one by one. Saff reads each document against the table. The LPO fills supplier, LPO number, item, unit and quantity ordered; the delivery note fills supplier, LPO number, item, quantity received, received by and date.
The rows that need a person are flagged: a quantity Saff was not sure it read, an LPO number it could not find, a signature where a name should be. Open the row, the photo is beside it, confirm or correct, mark reviewed. Export, and the workbook is the match, ready for whoever approves the invoice.
What Saff will not do
It will not decide whether the delivery was acceptable. It puts ordered and received side by side; the judgement about a short delivery or a substituted item is yours, and the sheet is built so that judgement is quick.
It will not read a quantity nobody could read. A number crossed out twice and written over comes back flagged, not guessed. On a delivery note that is the right behaviour: a guessed quantity becomes a paid invoice.
Can it read a photo of a delivery note from WhatsApp?
Yes. JPG, PNG and WEBP photos are read as images, at an angle and with shadow, and the values go into your columns. What the camera did not capture is flagged, not invented.
Can the LPO and the delivery note go into the same table?
Yes, and that is the point. Each document fills the columns it has; sort by LPO number and the ordered and received rows sit together.
Does it handle Arabic delivery notes?
Yes. Arabic, English and bilingual forms, including the supplier's stamp and a right-to-left layout on the same page as an English item code.
What does a month of delivery notes cost?
Each photo or PDF is one document, AED 0.50 for up to five pages, or the equivalent in your currency. Fifty delivery notes and their LPOs is about AED 50; the first 15 documents each month are free.
Match this month's deliveries
Upload the LPOs and the photos. Fifteen documents a month are free, no card.