Delivery note vs invoice: what each document proves, and how to match them

Each document answers a different question. The invoice tells you what the supplier wants to be paid. The delivery note tells you what the site actually received. Neither alone tells you whether the invoice is right: an invoice can only be checked against itself (do the lines add up?), and a delivery note says nothing about price.

Put them together — and add the price you agreed with the supplier — and you can answer the three questions that decide whether an invoice should be paid: was it delivered, in this quantity, at this price? That is the three-way match, adapted to construction, where the agreed price usually lives in a supply contract or price list rather than a purchase order per delivery. See how to reconcile supplier invoices for the step-by-step method.

The relationship is rarely one-to-one. Materials suppliers commonly send one invoice per month or per project covering many deliveries, so matching means grouping delivery notes, not pairing documents.

• One note, one invoice — typical for one-off purchases. Compare line by line.
• Many notes, one invoice — typical for concrete, aggregates, blocks. Sum the delivered quantities per item and compare with the invoice line.
• Invoice lines with no note — services (pumping, transport, rental days) or a missing note. See invoice without a delivery note.
• Notes never invoiced — not your problem today, but a liability the project will pay later; track it as pending exposure.

In Portugal the delivery note has a legal role. Goods moving between VAT-registered businesses must travel with a transport document under Decreto-Lei 147/2003, and the documents that qualify include the fatura (invoice), the guia de remessa, the nota de devolução and the guia de transporte. The guia has a minimum legal content — sender and receiver, tax IDs, commercial description and quantities, loading and unloading places, start date and time of transport — but no prices.

Two consequences for anyone checking invoices there. First, the invoice itself sometimes travels with the goods as the transport document, so the "delivery note" for that load is the invoice. Second, both documents carry a unique ATCUD code, which makes duplicates easier to catch. The invoice (fatura) has its own mandatory content under article 36 of the VAT Code, including the quantity and usual name of the goods, the net unit price and the VAT rate. More in guia de remessa explained and guia de transporte vs guia de remessa vs fatura.

The work described above — gathering delivery notes, summing quantities, opening the contract, comparing line by line — is what takes days at month-end, and it is often done twice: once by the site for quantities and once by finance for prices. Audiree, built in Portugal for Portuguese construction companies, does the matching with AI. Each delivery note is read line by line when the site photographs it; each invoice is read when it arrives; both are matched to the project contract and checked with ten deterministic validations (price against contract, totals, dates, quantities, supplier tax ID, contract reference, units, designation). What matches is approved automatically; divergences land in a review queue with the exact difference.