Sales Order Agent·October 23, 2026·4 min read
How to Check Proofs of Delivery Against Orders Before You Invoice
Daniel Emaasit
CEO, Logistify AI
TLDR
When a courier or 3PL delivers your orders, every proof of delivery (POD) has to be checked against the order before you invoice. Logistify does the checking: it reads each POD from the courier's email, finds the order in your ERP, and compares products, packs, quantities, signature and delivery time. Clean deliveries are marked ready to complete; a wrong pack, a missing item or a refused delivery is held for a person, with the reason.
Why PODs slow down invoicing
Many manufacturers, distributors and breweries let a courier hold their stock and deliver for them. For each delivered order, the courier emails a proof of delivery, usually a PDF showing what was handed over, to whom and when. Someone in the office opens each one, finds the order in the ERP, checks the lines, uploads the PDF and marks the delivery complete. The customer is only invoiced after that, so every POD that sits in an inbox is an invoice that hasn't gone out.
A craft brewery in London described exactly this to us. The checking matters: in one real case, the order was for a 12-pack, and the courier's POD showed a 30-litre keg of the same beer. Approving that POD without reading it would have invoiced the wrong product and left the courier's stock count wrong.
What to check on every POD
| Check | What goes wrong if you skip it |
|---|---|
| Every product and pack matches the order | A keg delivered instead of a 12-pack gets invoiced as ordered |
| Every quantity matches | Short deliveries are billed in full, and credit notes follow |
| Nothing extra was delivered | Stock leaves the warehouse without an invoice |
| The POD doesn't report a failed, refused, partial or damaged delivery | You invoice for goods the customer never accepted |
| There is a signature or a receiver's name | You have nothing to show if the customer disputes it |
| The delivery arrived inside the customer's window | Late deliveries go unnoticed until the customer complains |
| The POD came from your courier | A forged or misdirected document triggers an invoice |
How Logistify checks each POD
- 1You forward your courier's POD emails to a Logistify address used only for PODs.
- 2Logistify checks the sender against your accepted couriers and their dispatchers. A POD from anyone else is still checked but can never be marked ready to complete.
- 3It splits each email into one check per POD, whether the courier sends several files or one PDF holding several PODs, and keeps a multi-page POD together.
- 4It finds the order number printed on the POD and looks the order up in your ERP. If Logistify doesn't have that order yet, it imports it from the ERP.
- 5It compares the POD with the ERP's current order, not an older copy, so a quantity your team changed in the ERP after the order was entered is respected.
- 6It reads the delivered lines, quantities, delivery time, signature or receiver name, and any note about a failed or partial delivery, and compares each against the order.
- 7It attaches the POD to the order in Logistify and tells your team the result.
Further reading
The Coordination Tax: The $1.6 Trillion Cost of Running Supply Chain on Human Hands
The CEO's thesis on why every manual handoff in your supply chain is a hidden tax — and why AI Agents are the only way to eliminate it.
Read the memoThe four results
| Result | When | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Ready to complete | Everything matches | The order is marked delivered in Logistify, and your team completes it in the ERP |
| Ready to complete, with a flag | The right goods arrived, but outside the customer's delivery window | Same as ready, and your team is told it was late |
| Held for a person | Wrong product or pack, missing or extra item, different quantity, partial, refused or damaged delivery, no signature or receiver name, unknown sender, a second POD for the same order, or a cancelled order | Nothing is completed until someone looks |
| Could not check | The order wasn't found, the file couldn't be read, or the ERP couldn't be reached | Treated like a hold |
Each result arrives as an in-app notification, a note on the order and an email, which anyone can turn off. A held result names the courier, and the driver when the POD shows one your team has saved, so you know whom to call. When the wrong goods were delivered, it also warns that the stock at the courier's warehouse is probably different from your records.
Which ERPs it works with
POD checking works with the same ERPs as Logistify's sales order service: QuickBooks Online, TallyPrime and Tally ERP9, Unleashed, BREWW, SYSPRO, SAP, Shopify and Xero. The checks are the same whichever one you use.
What this is worth: faster invoices and working capital
Picture a manufacturer or distributor whose couriers send 500 PODs a month. Today someone opens every one, finds the order, reads every line and completes the delivery before the customer can be invoiced. That is hours of work every week, and while a POD waits in an inbox, its invoice waits too, and so does the cash.
- Invoices go out sooner: clean deliveries are ready to complete as soon as the POD arrives, so invoicing isn't held up by a backlog of PDFs.
- Working capital improves: invoicing sooner means getting paid sooner, instead of having cash tied up in deliveries nobody has checked yet.
- Your team's time goes to exceptions: instead of reading 500 PODs, people look only at the ones held for a reason, such as a wrong pack or a missing signature.
- Mistakes are caught before they're billed: a wrong product, short delivery or refused delivery is found before the invoice, not after the customer disputes it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Couriers sending you PODs?
Forward us a week of real POD emails, including the messy ones. We'll show which deliveries Logistify would mark ready and which it would hold, and why.
