Why Your Inwards Goods Process Is Costing You More Than You Think

You can negotiate your way to excellent supplier pricing. You can tender your stock items, lock in contracted rates, and genuinely feel like you’ve won. And then, quietly, over the next three to twelve months, you can pay more than you agreed to, on almost every delivery — and never know it.

This is the hidden cost of a poor inwards goods process. It doesn’t show up on a single invoice. It doesn’t trigger an alert. It accumulates in small increments, order by order, until the savings you thought you’d captured have silently reversed.

Getting your inwards goods process right is the step that turns a good negotiation into a lasting result. It’s also, in our experience, the part that most venues underinvest in.

The Problem Most Venues Don’t Know They Have

Here’s a pattern we’ve seen play out repeatedly across hospitality groups in Australia and New Zealand.

An Owner or Operations Manager does a good job. They run a supply tender, secure contracted pricing on their key items, and feel confident they’re buying well. They are looking forward to saving a whole bunch of money in the upcoming year. Within a few days, invoices start arriving and the purchasing process carries on as it always did — the delivery arrives, someone signs for it, the invoice goes to accounts.

What is far too cumbersome to check manually: whether the price on the invoice matches the contracted price. And it often doesn’t.

It might be a 50-cent difference on a protein line. It might be the wrong pack size, charged at the old unit rate. It might be a substitute that the supplier made without notifying anyone. Each variance is small. Across 100+ items, across multiple deliveries per week, across 12 months — the cumulative cost can be tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, per venue.

“Once we started using Loaded and following their inwards goods process, over time our cost of goods went from 38% to 24%. This is one of the major pieces that allowed our business to move from 6–8% annual net profit to just over 20%. It has been an absolute game changer for us.” — Steve Anderson, Lott Cafe and Pha’s Thai

The difference in Steve’s case wasn’t just better purchasing — it was an inwards goods process that ensured the purchasing gains were actually captured.

What Accurate Inwards Goods Actually Requires

The principle is straightforward: every delivery that comes through your back door needs to be checked against what you ordered, at the price you agreed to pay.

In practice, that means four things working in sequence:

1. Physical receiving — checking what arrives against what was ordered

Every delivery should be physically checked by the person receiving it. Not the driver. Not the chef who happens to be closest. The person whose job it is to receive stock checks the delivery against the purchase order: are all items present, in the right quantity, in the right condition?

If there are discrepancies — short deliveries, wrong items, damaged goods — they get noted and the driver is made aware before the delivery is signed for.

This is the clipboard step. Old school, yes — but every well-run venue combines their digital systems with a simple paper record at the point of delivery. Two clipboards: Outstanding Orders and Received Orders. When an order is received and checked, it moves from one to the other. At end of shift, everything on the Received Orders clipboard is entered into the inventory system.

2. Invoice capture — recording what was actually received at the price charged

Once the delivery is physically checked, the invoice is the record of what you’ve agreed to accept and pay for. This needs to go into your inventory system — either by your venue manager entering it, or (better) by your accounts team processing it centrally.

The key at this step: the price on the invoice is compared against your contracted price for that item. Not eyeballed — actually compared.

3. Price verification — catching and recovering discrepancies

If the invoice price doesn’t match the contracted price, a credit note request goes back to the supplier. Rather than doing it line by line on every invoice, you can automate this with Loaded so that you can just do one credit note at the end of a month or a quarter, whatever suits you best.

This is an accounts or finance team responsibility — not a kitchen responsibility. It requires a clear process: contracted prices are maintained in one place, invoices are compared to them, and discrepancies are chased systematically.

4. Statement reconciliation — the monthly close

At the end of each period, your accounts team should reconcile the supplier statement against the invoices received in your inventory system. This catches anything that slipped through invoice-by-invoice — items delivered but not billed, items billed but not delivered, and any outstanding credits that the supplier hasn’t processed. It also makes sure there is a natural check and balance that the team on site are receiving all invoices.

This reconciliation is what gives you an accurate cost of goods figure for the period. If you don’t do it, your cost of goods report might be missing inwards goods and your actual costs will never be accurate.

Streamlining the Process as You Scale

If you’re running multiple venues, the inwards goods process at venue level needs to feed into a centralised view at group level. The simplest version:

• Every venue manager receives stock using the same process and the same tools
• All invoices flow to a central accounts function (or a shared digital system)
• Price variances are flagged and actioned centrally
• A weekly summary shows what was received across the group versus what was ordered and what was contracted

The biggest risk as you scale: different venues developing different processes. One site uses the clipboard system, another eyeballs deliveries, a third doesn’t use a system at all. Your cost of goods across the group is only as accurate as your worst-performing site.

Standardisation is the fix. One process, trained consistently, used everywhere.

Automating the Heavy Lifting

The manual version of this process — checking every invoice by hand against a price list — is time-consuming. For a venue receiving thirty or forty deliveries a week across multiple suppliers, it’s a significant admin burden.

Loaded’s AI-powered invoice processing reads incoming invoices, maps them against your inventory items, and automatically cross-references the price charged against your contracted rate. It flags discrepancies for your team to act on rather than requiring someone to hunt for them line by line.

The clipboard for physical receiving stays in place , that’s a human task that requires a person at the door. The invoice verification and reconciliation is where automation genuinely saves time and catches errors that humans miss.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an inwards goods process in a restaurant?

An inwards goods process is the system a venue uses to receive, verify, and record deliveries, from the physical check at the back door through to the reconciliation of supplier invoices against contracted prices. A tight inwards goods process ensures that you receive what you ordered, at the price you agreed to pay, and that any discrepancies are caught and recovered before they compound.

How do I know if I’m being overcharged by suppliers?

The only reliable way is to check every invoice against your contracted prices. If you don’t have a process for this, overcharging is almost certainly happening to some degree. Start with a spot-check on your three highest-spend items for the last three months. Compare what you paid against what you contracted.

Why does inwards goods accuracy matter for cost of goods?

Your cost of goods calculation is only as accurate as your inwards goods data. If deliveries are not recorded, or if they’re recorded at the wrong price, your cost of goods report might be missing inwards goods and your actual costs will never be accurate. This means your pricing decisions, your recipe costing, and your profitability targets are all based on wrong information.

How do I set up an inwards goods process without expensive software?

The clipboard system works without any technology. Two clipboards — Outstanding Orders and Received Orders, and a process for checking deliveries physically before signing. The technology adds efficiency and automation, and pays for itself through the money you get back from suppliers, but the process can work manually. What it requires is consistency: the same steps, every delivery, every time.

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