Keep three quantities apart
A short delivery is not automatically a cancelled balance. Track what was ordered, what has arrived cumulatively, and what remains expected. Add a fourth field for an explicitly cancelled quantity when necessary. This prevents a second receiver from guessing whether the missing units are still coming.
Use the original order as the reference for successive receipts whenever your system supports it. Give each arrival its own date and delivery reference. A second purchase order can be appropriate for a genuinely new agreement, but creating one merely to receive the remainder makes duplicate ordering harder to spot. Keep the commercial decision and the physical observation separate.
Work through one split order
Consider a fictional order for 50 handles. Twenty arrive Monday, another 15 Thursday, and the supplier promises 15 next week. After Thursday, the useful record says ordered 50, received 35, outstanding 15. A note saying “15 received” without a date or cumulative context is easy to misread.
If the supplier later confirms that five of the remaining handles will not be supplied, preserve that decision. The order now expects ten more, with five cancelled. Do not simply change the historical receipt to make the screen look complete. The next person should be able to distinguish a delivery from an amendment without reading an entire email chain.
Use line-level receiving carefully
InFlow's current partial-receipt documentation supports entering the quantity received for an individual purchase-order line, choosing its unit where necessary, recording the receive date and saving the order. Its visual indicators distinguish partial from full receipt. These controls do not establish that the physical count was correct.
Before applying a partial receipt, check whether the field asks for this delivery's quantity or a cumulative total in the interface you are using. Record what you can verify, then inspect the remaining balance. If the result is unexpected, stop before adding another receipt. A repeated save or second receipt can turn a small misunderstanding into duplicated inventory.
Give the outstanding balance an owner
For each open balance, retain the supplier's latest promised date, the person following up, the customer or operation affected, and the next review date. A promise without a date is an uncertainty, not incoming stock you can confidently schedule.
Close the loop when the final shipment arrives, or when an authorized cancellation removes the remaining obligation. Investigate an old open line before deleting it: the goods may already be elsewhere, the receipt may be missing, or the supplier may have substituted a product. A simple shared short-delivery list can work at low volume. Dedicated purchase-order software helps when many split deliveries compete for attention, but it still needs someone to resolve each exception. Your next action is to pick the oldest short order and identify its exact remaining quantity and owner.
Sources used for this page
These records support the facts and comparisons above. Merchant-controlled records are labelled so you can separate product claims from independent evidence.
- inFlow: partially receive a purchase order — Merchant documentation · inflowinventory.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-24