The delivery came Tuesday evening. It was put away Wednesday morning.
A warehouse holds inventory for forty customers, billed by pallet position by day. Simple, until you ask when a pallet arrived.
The warehouse bills from Tuesday. The customer thinks Wednesday. Multiply by three hundred pallets and eleven months.
Neither side invented anything. There is a receiving note somewhere and a system entry somewhere else, made by different people at different times.
Three hundred pallets, one day of disagreement each
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Tue 18:40
Truck arrives
The driver's docket is signed at the gate. Both sides have this.
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Tue 19:10
Unloaded to the dock
Off the truck, on the floor, not yet in a rack. The warehouse counts this as received.
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Tue 21:00
Shift ends
Nothing moves overnight. Nothing is recorded either, because no system covers a pallet sitting on a dock.
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Wed 07:30
Put away to rack
Scanned into a position. The customer's system sees the pallet for the first time here.
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Wed 08:00
Confirmation sent
A stock report goes out. Both sides now agree the pallet exists, and disagree about since when.
- Both parties recorded it
- Only the warehouse recorded it
- Only the customer recorded it
- Nobody recorded it
Twelve hours where custody is real and unrecorded. At three hundred pallets across eleven months, that gap is the invoice dispute.
If you run a warehouse, or store goods in one.
Being designed, nothing to use. What helps is the real mechanics of your month end and what usually gets disputed.