A goods receipt note (GRN), also called a goods received note or receiving report, is an internal document recording what was physically delivered against a purchase order. It is created by whoever receives the shipment, and it is the only independent evidence that goods actually arrived before an invoice gets paid.
These are the same document. The two phrasings are used interchangeably across regions and ERP systems, along with 'receiving report' in North American usage and 'GRN' as the near-universal abbreviation. No accounting standard distinguishes them.
What does differ is what the document is called inside a given ERP. SAP uses goods receipt, Sage and many UK-influenced systems use GRN, and NetSuite refers to item receipt. Teams working across multiple systems often encounter all three names for one underlying record.
Three-way matching compares the purchase order, the goods receipt note, and the supplier invoice. The GRN is the middle document and the one that carries the most weight, because the PO only says what was ordered and the invoice only says what the supplier claims to have shipped. The GRN is the sole record of what actually showed up.
EXAMPLE
PO ordered 500 units at $18. Supplier invoiced 500 units at $18 for $9,000. The GRN records 470 units received, 30 short. Without the GRN the invoice matches the PO perfectly and gets paid in full, overpaying by $540.
These are frequently confused but differ in who creates them, which determines how much they can be trusted as a control. A packing slip or delivery note is produced by the supplier and states what they say is in the shipment. A GRN is produced by the buyer after counting, and states what the buyer confirms arrived. Only the GRN is independent of the party being paid.
In practice a receiver often uses the packing slip as the checklist and the GRN as the verified output. Treating the packing slip itself as the receiving record removes the independent verification entirely, which is a control weakness auditors look for.
In distribution and manufacturing, the most common reason an invoice sits unpaid is not a pricing dispute. It is that no receiving record was ever entered, so the invoice cannot be matched and cannot be approved. The goods are physically in the warehouse and may already have been sold, but the paperwork gate never opened.
The invoice then ages into the 30 and 60 day buckets on the aging report, looking like a deliberate payment decision when it is really an unprocessed receiving document at a loading dock.
EXAMPLE
A distributor with 40 open AP exceptions finds 26 are missing GRNs rather than genuine discrepancies. Each one requires someone to call a branch, confirm the delivery arrived, and enter the receipt retroactively before the invoice can move.
