What is Goods receipt (GRN)?

A goods receipt note (GRN) is the record of what a hotel actually received against an order: the items, the quantities, the unit of measure, and the condition of the goods at the moment of delivery. It is the “what arrived” in a 3-way check, and it is the only document created by the hotel rather than by the supplier.

The record that makes every other check possible.

A purchase order says what was intended. An invoice says what is being charged. Both are statements of expectation. Only the goods receipt says what physically happened at the dock — which makes it the one piece of evidence that can settle a disagreement about a short delivery.

Without it, a dispute is one person’s memory of a Tuesday morning against a printed document. The printed document wins every time.

A worked example.

Six cases of house blend coffee are ordered. Four arrive, and the receiver writes on the sheet: four cases, two short, driver to redeliver Thursday. The invoice, cut from the order file, bills six.

With that one line of handwriting, the gap is provable and the conversation with the supplier takes a minute. Without it, the hotel is asking for a credit on the strength of a recollection three weeks old — and usually decides it is not worth the call.

What a useful goods receipt actually needs.

• The date and time the delivery arrived
• The item and the quantity in the unit actually delivered
• Anything short, damaged, substituted, or refused
• Who received it

That is the whole list. It does not require a formal receiving system — a count noted at the loading dock, a photo of the annotated packing slip, or a line in a notebook does the job. What matters is that the count happened while the delivery was still in front of you.

Receipt, packing slip, and delivery note.

The three are easy to confuse and are not the same thing. A packing slip and a delivery note are the supplier’s statements of what was loaded onto the truck. The goods receipt is the hotel’s statement of what came off it.

That distinction is the entire value of the document. If the only record on file is the supplier’s own paperwork, then the order, the delivery evidence, and the invoice all originate from the same party — and a three-way check built on them is really a one-way check wearing a costume. A signed packing slip with a shortage written on it in the receiver’s handwriting becomes a goods receipt. An unmarked signature does not.

Why hotels skip it.

Deliveries arrive at five in the morning during a check-out rush. The person at the door is a line cook, not a receiving clerk. The supplier’s driver is in a hurry and has four more stops. Signing takes two seconds; counting eighteen cases takes ten minutes.

So the step gets skipped — and that single omission is why billed-but-not-received items go unnoticed until the money has already left.

What Atrium does with it.

Atrium holds the receipt alongside the order and the invoice and compares all three line by line, so a shortage becomes an exception rather than a memory. Where no receipt exists, Atrium still checks the invoice against the order and against the item’s own price history, and says plainly which part of the check it could not complete.

See how the three documents work together in 3-way matching and how the checks run day to day inside hotel procurement software.