Wholesale Handler
Agreeing the answer before the pick, not at it
The three options are not equivalent to a buyer. A chef who has written a dish round your goat's cheese wants a substitute; a shop working to a fixed shelf plan wants the shortfall credited and nothing else in its place; a wholesaler with a slow-moving line wants the balance on the next run.
One grocery study measured how much the agreement matters: a delivered substitute was accepted 100% of the time where the customer had chosen it themselves, 75% where a pre-agreed policy chose it, and 66% where the selection was arbitrary. The shortfall is rarely the complaint. A substitute the buyer did not agree to is.
So the preference belongs on the account, captured once, with a named default for everything else - substitutes accepted, short-ship only, or ask me first. Where the alternative changes the price, the pack size, the specification, a certification or the delivery date, the buyer approves that specific swap before it goes out. Allergen and high-value lines are the ones to hold back for an answer rather than a policy.
Keep the evidence while you are at it: the ordered product code, the code of what went instead, who agreed it and when. A dispute three weeks later is settled by that record, or it is not settled.
Telling the customer before the delivery arrives
Check your own records first. A line that reads short at the pick is sometimes a stock count that drifted rather than a real shortfall, and a notice sent on the wrong premise costs more credibility than the shortage.
Then send one message naming the products short, the quantity going out against the quantity ordered, and what happens to the balance - credited, substituted, or following on a named date. A buyer who hears it from you keeps a supplier; one who finds it at the back door raises a chargeback.
If the cause sits upstream with your own supplier, say so, and say which deliveries after this one it affects.
What the delivery note and the invoice must say
Write the quantity actually sent beside the quantity ordered, line by line - "118 of 120 cases, 2 short". Do not overwrite the ordered column with the figure that went out, which is the one mistake that hides the shortage: the paperwork then reconciles perfectly against an order nobody placed, and the credit due to the customer disappears with it.
A back-ordered balance takes a date on the note, not just a note that it is coming.
The reason this matters on the invoice is that a buyer of any size runs a three-way match - purchase order against delivery note or goods received note, both against the invoice. An invoice billing 120 where the note says 118 does not get paid short; it stops in their accounts payable until somebody reconciles it by hand, and your payment slips by however long that takes. Packing slip vs invoice covers which figures belong on which document.
An unissued invoice is amended, an issued one is credited
Apparel-trade guidance draws the dividing line at the buyer's accounts payable - amend the invoice until they have entered it, credit it afterwards. For a UK seller, HMRC's rule is narrower and is the one that binds: once a VAT invoice has been issued, a decrease in what the customer owes goes on a credit note, and the state of their accounts payable is not the test.
The practical consequence for a small supplier: the cheapest correction is the one made before the invoice goes out. Pick, weigh, record what actually went, then invoice - in that order - and most shortfalls do not become a credit note at all.
What a credit note must carry
A valid UK credit note states its own identifying number and date of issue, your name, address and VAT registration number, the customer's name and address, the number and date of the original invoice, a description of the goods, the decrease excluding VAT, and the rate and amount of VAT credited. Give it its own number sequence rather than borrowing the invoice series, so an auditor cannot read a credit as revenue.
Two further points from HMRC's guidance:
- A decrease in consideration occurs when you make the refund to the customer, and the 14 days run from there. Miss them and the adjustment stops being a price change: it becomes an error to correct under the normal rules instead.
- Where you and the customer agree not to adjust the VAT, the document must say clearly that this is not a credit note for VAT.
Record a reason against every credit - short delivery, damaged or rejected, returned goods, price adjustment. Four months of those reasons tells you which line, and which of your own growers, keeps running short. Returns of unsold stock are a different arrangement with its own paperwork; sale or return with wholesale bakery customers covers that one.
Correcting a draft invoice in Wholesale Handler
Processed orders collate into one draft invoice per customer, and that draft is where a shortfall gets settled before anything reaches the customer.
- Edit the quantity, the unit price or the tax rate on any line.
- Delete a line outright. Where the invoice then holds no further line from that order, Wholesale Handler unlinks the order, which returns it to the uninvoiced pool so it can be collated again after the balance goes out.
- Add an adjustment line with your own description and a negative amount, for a shortfall that does not map onto one line cleanly - a short weight across a mixed pallet, an agreed allowance on quality.
Totals are not hand-maintained. Wholesale Handler re-sums the subtotal, the tax and the total from the lines after every one of those changes, and the adjustment route refuses an amount that would push the invoice total below zero.
When you finalise an invoice, Wholesale Handler stamps it, freezes the particulars a tax authority asks for, and emails the PDF. After that it is immutable: the three editing routes each check for draft status first and refuse a sent invoice. That is the behaviour an accountant expects, and it means the correction window closes at the send, so a draft is worth reading once before it goes.
Catch-weight lines already bill what went out
A catch-weight product - a whole fish, a leg of lamb, a side of beef - is ordered by count, priced on a typical weight, then re-priced from the weight recorded at picking.
On recording, Wholesale Handler re-settles the whole order against the terms snapshotted when it was placed: the subtotal, the tax, the delivery charge and the total, including re-testing the free-delivery threshold against the new subtotal. Weighing is open from the moment the order locks until it is invoiced, and Wholesale Handler refuses to raise an invoice for an order whose catch-weight lines are still unweighed, because the typical-weight estimate would otherwise bill as the actual.
This is the one place in the product where what was sent already overrides what was ordered. A kilo short on a catch-weight line needs no credit note and no conversation about paperwork, because the invoice did not overstate the delivery in the first place.
What a customer can change, and until when
A customer can change an order they have already placed - the delivery date, the quantities, the products - until it locks, and the full set of changes is shown for approval before it saves, with the same summary in the email that follows. How to handle wholesale customers who change their orders covers where to set that window.
Standing orders re-check themselves at the moment they fire rather than trusting what was saved weeks ago. A line that is out of season or marked unavailable for that date is dropped with a return date and the customer is emailed about it, instead of being ordered and then shorted at the pick.
Changing a placed order from the supplier's side is not built yet, so a correction you make lands on the draft invoice rather than on the order itself.
Not built yet: recording the short, and credit notes
Two parts of the job above have been designed and are not in the product today.
- Short-shipping and substitution at pick. There is no way to record a short quantity or a substitute product against an order line, and no per-customer substitution preference to hold what the account has agreed. Today that preference lives in your own notes and the message to the customer is yours to send.
- Credit notes against a sent invoice. The design is settled - a separate credit-note document with its own number sequence, a reason recorded against each one, allocated to the specific invoice it credits and netted off that invoice's outstanding balance - but nothing writes one yet.
Both sit under Considering on the roadmap. Until they ship, the workflow is to settle the shortfall on the draft before it goes out, and where a correction is needed after the send, to raise the credit note in your accounting software against the invoice reference Wholesale Handler issued.
