Smart Receiving
Use this page to upload a supplier's invoice (a PDF or a phone photo) and have it read into purchase order lines, so you don't type it in by hand.
Quick steps
- Go to Products, click More Actions, then Supplier Invoices (under Ordering & Transfers).
- Click Upload Document and choose the file.
- Set Document type (usually Invoice), pick the Supplier, and pick the Purchase order if you already raised one. Click Upload and read.
- Wait about a minute, then refresh. Open the document and compare its lines with the paper — click View original to see them side by side.
- At the bottom, pick the purchase order (or Create a new order from this document) and click Apply document.
- You land on the order's receiving screen. Match any line that says it needs a product, then count or scan the delivery in as usual.
Smart Receiving only records what the supplier charged you for. Stock goes up only when someone counts or scans what physically arrived.
Common questions
I don't see Supplier Invoices in the menu. Smart Receiving is switched on for your store by Brother POS. Ask support to turn it on — there is nothing for you to set up.
It says "Needs checking". Is something wrong? Not necessarily. It means a person should look at something — the totals didn't add up, couldn't be checked, or a line couldn't be matched to a product. You can still apply it.
It says "Could not read". Re-take the photo flat, well lit, with the whole page in frame, and upload it again (or click Read again).
Why does the first invoice from a supplier need so much matching? Each time you match a line by hand, Brother POS remembers that supplier's code and wording. By the third or fourth delivery most lines match on their own.
I uploaded the wrong file. Click Delete on the document. Only documents that haven't been applied can be deleted.
More detail: what Smart Receiving is, and the three-way match
Smart Receiving reads a supplier's paperwork for you. You upload the invoice — a PDF from your email, a scan, or a photo taken on your phone at the back door — and Brother POS turns it into a list of lines: what the supplier says they sent you, how many, and at what price. You check that list, then apply it to a purchase order.
The point is to stop typing invoices in by hand. It is not a way to add stock automatically.
Smart Receiving records what the supplier says they sent and charged you for. It never changes a single unit of inventory.
Stock still moves the way it always has: someone opens the box, scans what is physically in it on the receiving screen or in Scan to Receive, and that is what gets added. If the invoice says 24 and only 20 turned up, your stock goes up by 20 — and the missing 4 show up on the Receiving Variance report.
Smart Receiving is turned on for your store by Brother POS. If you do not see it, ask support to enable it — there is nothing for you to configure. Once it is on, you'll find it on the Products page: click More Actions, then Supplier Invoices under Ordering & Transfers. The page has a Purchase Orders button to get back to your orders.
You don't need Smart Receiving for those orders. When you order from the distributor's catalog, the purchase order already carries their products, prices and invoice, and receiving creates any new products for you. See Retailer Features.
The Three-Way Match, in Plain Terms
Everything on this page exists to answer three questions about the same delivery:
| Question | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|
| What did we order? | The purchase order you raised. |
| What were we charged for? | The supplier's invoice — this is what Smart Receiving fills in. |
| What actually turned up? | The physical count someone scanned in at the dock. |
Before Smart Receiving, the middle number did not exist anywhere, so "hang on, were we billed for stock we never got?" was a question nobody could answer. Now all three sit side by side on the Receiving Variance report.
More detail: uploading, and how a document is read
Uploading a Document
- Go to the Supplier Documents page (Products → More Actions → Supplier Invoices).
- Click Upload Document.
- Choose the file. A PDF or a photo (JPEG, PNG, WebP or HEIC) works. Up to 25MB.
- Pick the Document type:
| Type | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Invoice | The bill. This is what you will use most of the time. |
| Packing slip | The list that came in the box. |
| Credit note | A credit against something you were already invoiced for. A credit note must be applied to the order it credits — you cannot let it create a new one. |
- Pick the Supplier, or leave it on Work it out from the document. Brother POS then reads the supplier name off the paperwork and uses it if it matches the name of one of your suppliers exactly (capital letters aside).
- Optionally pick the Purchase order this invoice belongs to. Only open orders (not yet fully received or cancelled) are listed. Leave it on None — create one from this document and a new order can be created from the document when you apply it.
- Click Upload and read.
Reading a document usually takes under a minute. The page shows Queued or Reading… and Still reading. Refresh in a moment. while it works — refresh to see the result.
A clear, flat photo reads far better than a crumpled invoice shot at an angle. Handwritten notes in the margin are fine — the reader is given the whole page.
Once Brother POS knows the supplier, it uses everything it has already learned about how that supplier writes their product descriptions, so more lines match on their own. That works whether you pick the supplier or it is worked out from the document, but working it out needs the name on the paperwork to match your supplier's name exactly — picking it makes sure. See How the system learns your suppliers.
What Happens to the Document
Once uploaded, Brother POS:
- Pulls the text off it. A PDF that came out of the supplier's accounting software already contains real text, so it is read exactly, with no chance of a misread digit. A photo or a scanned PDF is read with character recognition instead. For a scanned PDF, up to the first 10 pages are read, so only a scanned invoice longer than that will come back short.
- Turns it into lines. Each row on the invoice becomes a line: description exactly as the supplier printed it, their SKU, quantity, unit cost, line total.
- Checks the maths against the invoice's own total (see below).
- Tries to match each line to a product in your catalogue.
- Sets a status so you know whether a person needs to look at it.
Descriptions are copied exactly as the supplier wrote them, abbreviations, misspellings and all. That is deliberate — that odd wording is how the system recognises the same item on their next invoice.
The Arithmetic Check
Before you are asked to trust anything, Brother POS adds up the lines it read and compares that to the subtotal or total printed on the document.
This catches the failure everyone is right to worry about: a 3 read as an 8, or a decimal point that went missing. If the lines do not add up to what the document says, something was misread, and the document is held for checking rather than handed to you as if it were correct.
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| A green box: "The lines add up to $X, which matches the document." | The maths ties out. Small rounding differences are tolerated. |
| A red box explaining the gap | The lines do not add up to the document's total. Something was read wrong. Open the original and check before you apply it. |
| An amber box: "The totals could not be verified…" | The maths could not be checked at all — usually because the document did not print a subtotal or total to check against, or no line values were read. The reason is shown in brackets. Check the quantities yourself. |
The check prefers the document's subtotal. If there is no subtotal, it uses the total minus tax, or the plain total. It allows a difference of 5 cents or 1%, whichever is bigger.
The check never edits a number. It only decides whether the document can go through without a human looking at it. A document whose maths could not be checked is always held as Needs checking.
Document Statuses
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Queued | Uploaded, waiting to be read. |
| Reading… | Being read right now. Refresh in a moment. |
| Read cleanly | The maths tied out and every line found a product. Ready to apply. |
| Needs checking | Something wants your eyes: the maths did not tie out, the maths could not be checked, or one or more lines could not be matched to a product. |
| Applied | Turned into purchase order lines. |
| Could not read | The file could not be read at all — usually an unreadable photo. |
"Needs checking" is not an error. It is the normal state for most first-time deliveries from a supplier, and it simply means the document cannot be trusted end-to-end without a person confirming something. You can still apply it.
If a document could not be read, click Read again at the top of it. It never re-reads on its own: an unreadable photo does not become readable on the second attempt, so it is worth re-taking the photo first. An applied document cannot be re-read.
More detail: reviewing, applying and matching lines
Reviewing What It Read
Open a document to see everything it found:
- The supplier, the invoice number and the document total at the top, plus a View original link so you can put the paperwork side by side with the reading.
- The arithmetic check result.
- The lines it read.
Each line shows:
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
| As printed | The description exactly as the supplier wrote it. |
| Their SKU | The supplier's own code for the item, if the document had one. |
| Qty | The quantity billed. Couldn't read (in red) means the number couldn't be made out: that line is not applied, so check the paper and add it to the order yourself, or try Read again. |
| Unit cost | The price per unit billed. Couldn't read means no cost is recorded for that line — it is never taken as $0. Enter the cost on the order. |
| Our product | The product in your catalogue this line was matched to — or Needs choosing. |
| How matched | How the match was made, and how confident it is. |
Lines It Could Not Match
A line reading Needs choosing means Brother POS could not confidently say which of your products it is. Where it has close guesses, it shows the nearest one or two under the line.
This is the safety boundary of the whole feature: an unmatched line receives nothing. It cannot quietly guess and add stock to the wrong product. You resolve it, on the receiving screen, after you apply the document — see Resolving lines that need a product.
Matching works down a ladder: exact barcode or SKU first (including supplier codes learned from past deliveries), then this supplier's own wording learned from past deliveries, then a close-name search of your own catalogue. When the name search turns up likely candidates but none is a clear winner, Brother POS picks between those candidates — or declines and leaves the line for you. It is choosing from a list of things you actually stock — it cannot produce a product that does not exist in your system.
Applying a Document to a Purchase Order
Once you are happy with the reading, at the bottom of the document:
- Pick the Purchase order this invoice belongs to, or leave it on Create a new order from this document — useful when the goods turned up without anyone raising an order first.
- Click Apply document.
Applying writes the invoiced leg of the three-way match onto the order:
- A line that matches a product already on the order fills in the invoiced quantity and invoiced cost on that line.
- A line for a product not on the order is added to the order, with the invoiced quantity as its ordered quantity.
- A line that could not be matched is added too, marked as needing a product chosen. It is not dropped — being billed for something you cannot identify is exactly the thing you want to see, not lose.
- A credit note reduces the invoiced quantity on the line it credits. If nothing on the order was invoiced for that product, the credit cannot be placed and the document says so.
You are then taken straight to the order's receiving screen. An order created from a document starts at Confirmed.
A document cannot be applied to a cancelled purchase order, and a credit note cannot be applied without picking an order.
Applying records what you were charged. Your inventory has not moved. You still receive the delivery by counting or scanning what physically arrived.
If some lines could not be applied — a credit for a product nothing on the order was invoiced for, or a credit larger than what was invoiced, say — Brother POS tells you which ones and puts the document back to Needs checking rather than reporting success it did not achieve.
An applied document is kept as part of your audit trail.
Resolving Lines That Need a Product
On the receiving screen (Purchase Orders → open the order → Receive Order), any line that still needs a product appears at the top under item(s) need matching before receiving. For each one you get three ways out:
- Match to: [suggested product] — one click, if a suggestion is right.
- Search the catalogue — type into the search box under the line and pick the product it really is. Use this whenever the suggestions are wrong or there are none. It is there so you never have to create a duplicate just because the supplier wrote the name a new way.
- Create as new product — only when this genuinely is something you have never stocked before.
Creating a new product for an item you already stock is how a supplier's inconsistent wording turns into three near-identical products, split stock counts and a catalogue nobody trusts. If you already sell it, find it with the search box.
How the System Learns Your Suppliers
Every time you resolve a line by hand, Brother POS remembers it. The supplier's SKU, their barcode and their wording for that item are stored against the product, tied to that supplier. Next time that distributor sends an invoice with the same odd abbreviation on it, the line matches on its own and nobody has to touch it.
When learning happens, the confirmation message says so: "Learned 2 supplier code(s) — this will match automatically next time."
This is where the real time saving comes from. Expect the first two or three deliveries from a new supplier to need work. By the third or fourth, the list of lines needing attention should be short, and should mostly be genuinely new products.
A supplier's wording is remembered per supplier, because two distributors can both write "HOUSE BLEND 1G" and mean completely different things. Codes like barcodes and SKUs are unique across your whole catalogue.
If you resolve a line to a product but that supplier code is already recorded against a different product, Brother POS keeps your decision for this delivery but does not silently repoint the code. That conflict is worth a look — usually it means two products in your catalogue are really the same thing.
More detail: a complete example
A Complete Example
Your distributor delivers on Tuesday.
- You photograph the invoice at the back door and upload it as an Invoice, picking the distributor from the list.
- A minute later it shows Needs checking: 18 lines read, 15 matched, 3 needing a product chosen. The maths ties out.
- You open it, glance at the three odd ones, and click Apply document against the purchase order you raised last week.
- On the receiving screen you match two of the three from the catalogue search box, and create the third as a new product because it is a new line the rep talked you into.
- You open the box and scan everything in with Scan to Receive, pointed at the same purchase order. This is the step that changes your stock.
- One case is missing. When you finish the receipt, Brother POS tells you straight away which lines came up short, and the Receiving Variance report shows it as: ordered 24, invoiced 24, received 12 — with the value of that missing case sitting in the "at stake" column, ready for the phone call.
- Next month's invoice from the same distributor reads cleanly, because the three lines you resolved taught the system their codes.
More detail: troubleshooting and best practices
Troubleshooting
The document says "Could not read". The file could not be read at all. Re-take the photo — flat, well-lit, whole page in frame — and upload it again, or click Read again.
The status is "Needs checking" but everything looks right. Check the coloured box near the top and the Our product column. Either the arithmetic did not tie out (red box — compare the lines against the original), the totals could not be checked (amber box), or at least one line reads Needs choosing. All three are normal reasons to be asked, and you can still apply the document.
The lines do not add up to the total. Something was misread. Open View original and compare. Suppliers who apply per-line discounts that do not print as their own row can also trigger this. Do not apply a document you cannot reconcile — try Read again with a better photo, or type that order in by hand as a normal purchase order.
A line matched to the wrong product. On the receiving screen, resolve it with the catalogue search box before completing the receipt. Whatever you pick is what the system learns.
I applied a document to the wrong purchase order. Applied documents cannot be re-applied or moved. On the wrong order, remove the lines it added (a line can be removed while nothing on it has been received), or cancel the order if it should not exist and nothing has been received on it.
Applying said some lines could not be applied. The message names them. Usually it is a line whose quantity couldn't be read, a credit note for something that was never invoiced on that order, or a credit bigger than what was invoiced. The document goes back to Needs checking so you can deal with it. Applying it again adds only what is still missing — the lines that already went in aren't added twice.
I uploaded the wrong file, or the same invoice twice. Click Delete at the top of the document, or next to it in the list. Only a document that hasn't been applied can be deleted — an applied one is part of the record of what you were billed.
Best Practices
- Upload the invoice before you open the box. Then the receiving screen already knows what you were charged for, and shortages jump out as you scan.
- Always name the supplier on upload. It is the single thing that most improves how many lines match on their own.
- Search the catalogue before creating a new product. Duplicates are much harder to clean up than they are to avoid.
- Treat the first few deliveries from a supplier as an investment. The matching work you do now is work you never do again for those items.
- Never treat "applied" as "received". Stock only moves when someone counts or scans the physical delivery.
- Check the Receiving Variance report weekly. That is where being billed for goods that never arrived becomes visible.
What's Next?
- Scan to Receive — scan the physical delivery in against the order.
- Purchase Orders — raise, receive and track orders.
- Receiving Variance — ordered vs invoiced vs received, with the money at stake.
- Stock Adjustments — correct stock by hand when needed.
- Categories & Brands — set up suppliers.