Goods in transit are still your stock

The gap between despatch and receipt

Stock leaves your godown. It arrives at a customer or a branch two days later. For those two days it is gone from your stock record and not yet in theirs, and if something happens to it the argument about who was responsible starts from no shared facts at all.

Businesses moving material between their own locations have this problem most acutely, because there is no invoice forcing anyone to reconcile.

The e-way bill is a record you are already creating

Consignments above the prescribed value threshold require an e-way bill before movement, and it carries the consignor, consignee, goods, value and vehicle. That is most of a transit record, generated because the law requires it rather than because anyone chose to track transit.

Thresholds and state-level rules for intra-state movement have varied and can change, so confirm the current position for your states rather than working from a figure you remember. What is durable is that the document exists and most businesses file it away instead of using it.

Give transit its own status

Stock should move to an in-transit state on despatch and out of it on confirmed receipt, rather than disappearing and reappearing.

Two things follow. Anything sitting in transit longer than the route takes is visible as an exception, and a shortage found on arrival can be attributed to a specific consignment and vehicle instead of being absorbed into a general stock difference at month end.

Record short receipts at the gate

Ten cartons despatched, nine received. If the receiving location books nine and says nothing, the difference lands in the despatching location's stock variance and nobody connects the two.

Recorded as a short receipt against the consignment, it is a specific claim against a specific movement, which is the only version that ever gets resolved.