Delivery Notes
Recording deliveries proves where your food came from and what condition it arrived in.
Recording a Delivery
Open Delivery Notes for the Area receiving the stock and add a new note.
- Delivery date and time — when it actually arrived
- Order / invoice reference — from the supplier's paperwork
- Supplier — suggested from your Address Book as you type
- Received by — the staff member who accepted it
- Temperature on arrival — optional, but see below
- Notes — anything unusual
- Photos — up to five
Two checkboxes carry the most weight: temperature outside acceptable range, and delivery was rejected.
Temperature on Arrival
The field is optional because not every delivery is chilled — a sack of flour has no meaningful temperature.
For anything chilled or frozen, record it. This is the most useful field on the form. If a supplier delivers cold stock warm and you recorded it, the problem is documented against them. If you did not, you are the last person who can be shown to have handled it.
Probe between packs rather than piercing product where you can, and record what the probe says rather than what you expect it to say.
Rejecting a Delivery
If you turn stock away, record it anyway with delivery was rejected ticked, and say why in the notes.
A rejected delivery with no record is invisible. A rejected delivery with a photo, a temperature and a reason is evidence that your checks work — worth considerably more at inspection than a run of deliveries that were all apparently perfect.
Photographs
Photograph anything you are describing in words: a damaged case, a torn seal, a probe display showing an out-of-range reading, a date label already passed.
A photo settles a supplier dispute weeks later in a way a typed note does not.
Suppliers and the Address Book
Supplier names are suggested from your Address Book. Adding your regular suppliers there once means their names stay consistent on every delivery afterwards.
Consistency matters more than it sounds. "Brakes", "Brakes Bros" and "brakes bros" are three different suppliers as far as any later search is concerned, and you will discover that at the worst possible moment — while trying to trace a batch quickly.
Why Bother
Deliveries are where traceability starts. If a product is recalled, the question is simple: did you receive it, when, and what happened to it. A complete delivery record answers that in a minute. An incomplete one turns it into a day of guesswork, and guesswork is not an answer you can give an inspector.