Invoice without a delivery note: how to handle it from the receiving side

• The note is still on site — in the site office, the van or a folder waiting to be sent.
• The note was lost, damaged or never signed — rain, dust and busy gates.
• It was filed under another project — the delivery address was wrong or the note was sent to the wrong team.
• The invoice was the transport document — in Portugal an invoice (fatura) can travel with the goods instead of a guia de remessa, so there is no separate note.
• The line is a service, not goods — pumping, waiting time, transport, rental days: evidence is a site record, not a delivery note.
• The goods were not delivered — cancelled, returned, delivered short, or invoiced by mistake.

1. 01Identify exactly which invoice lines lack a delivery note — not the whole invoice.
2. 02Search your own records first: other projects, other suppliers’ folders, photos in the site chat, email attachments.
3. 03Ask the site: was this delivered, when, and who received it? Site diaries and pour records count as evidence.
4. 04Ask the supplier for the signed delivery record (or, in Portugal, the guia de remessa or the invoice that travelled with the goods, identified by its number and ATCUD).
5. 05Approve the lines that are supported and hold only the unsupported amount, where your process allows partial approval.
6. 06If the delivery did not happen or was short, ask for a credit note referencing the invoice.
7. 07Record the outcome, so the same line is not investigated twice next month.

In Portugal, goods moving between VAT-registered businesses must travel with a transport document under Decreto-Lei 147/2003 — an invoice, a guia de remessa, a return note, a guia de transporte or an equivalent document. So for goods, some document should exist: ask for it by number. When goods are not accepted immediately and in full (part of a load refused, for example), the regime requires an additional paper transport document identifying the change; in practice it is often a handwritten note on the guia, which is exactly the kind of evidence that goes missing.

The obligations to issue and report these documents sit with the sender; the receiver has no reporting obligation. Your task as receiver is operational: keep your copy and match it. More in guia de remessa explained and guia de transporte vs guia de remessa vs fatura.

• Capture every delivery note the day it arrives — a phone photo sent from the site is enough — tagged with the project.
• Keep one delivery record per load, whichever document it came with.
• Agree with suppliers that invoices reference their delivery notes (and contract).
• Match continuously, not at month-end: a missing note found on day 2 is a phone call; found on day 35 it is an investigation.

In Audiree the site photographs each delivery note in the chat group it already uses, so notes reach the platform when the goods arrive, not weeks later. When the invoice comes in, AI reads every line and matches it against the delivered lines and the project contract. A line that is not backed by a delivery is not approved automatically: it goes to the review queue with the exact difference, and nothing is discarded silently. Everything that matches is approved on its own, so the team’s time goes on the lines that genuinely need a phone call.

Audiree is built in Portugal and works today with Portuguese construction companies. Reading is layout-agnostic, so documents from any supplier can be processed; if you work in another market, a demo with your own documents is the honest way to check the fit.