Short deliveries: the missing keg your stocktake finds five weeks too late

A keg you were billed for that never came off the dray doesn't look like a delivery problem by the time you find it. It looks like theft. Your stock system booked it in from the invoice, the till sold none of it, and weeks later the stocktake shows a keg's worth of loss nobody can explain. Meanwhile the claim window in your supplier's small print closed the day the wagon pulled away, and with some suppliers it closed the moment you signed. Count the drop before you sign. Here's the law, the small print, and the five-minute routine.

Deliveries land at the worst possible time. The driver's on a schedule, the cellar flap's open, the phone's going, and there's a piece of paper under your nose with a pen attached. Most short deliveries aren't anyone being crooked. They're a picking error in a depot at 4am, a case left on the tail lift, a 30-litre keg pulled where the note says 50. But the paperwork doesn't care how it happened. Once you've signed clean, it's your word against a signed document that says everything arrived.

What the law actually says

The Sale of Goods Act 1979, section 30, is the baseline for business-to-business deliveries: "Where the seller delivers to the buyer a quantity of goods less than he contracted to sell, the buyer may reject them, but if the buyer accepts the goods so delivered he must pay for them at the contract rate." In plain English: if the drop is short you can turn the whole thing away, or keep what came and pay only for what came. You never owe for goods that didn't arrive.

That sounds like decent protection. In practice it's the floor, not the ceiling, because proving what arrived is the whole fight, and your evidence is that delivery note.

What your supplier's terms say, which is what actually bites

Supplier conditions of sale sit on top of the Act, and they are tighter than most licensees think. Two real examples from wholesaler terms published online, both checked this week.

HT Drinks: "All alcohol and tobacco must be checked off at the time of delivery and queries reported to the delivery driver immediately. No discrepancies will be considered if such goods are not checked off at time of delivery." Read that twice. Under terms like these, the claim window is the doorstep. Not the same afternoon when you break the load down. The doorstep.

Primo Drinks: "All claims for short delivery, breakages or damages must be notified by telephone on the day of delivery and confirmed in writing within three days." More forgiving, still tight: a phone call the same day, then writing inside three days.

Your own wholesaler and brewery will have their own version, on their website or the back of the credit application nobody reads. Go and find it once. Whether your window is the doorstep, the same day or three days changes what your delivery routine needs to be.

"Received unchecked" is not a shield

The familiar move when the driver's in a hurry is to scrawl "received unchecked" next to the signature. Against terms that require goods to be checked off at the time of delivery, that scrawl is worth very little. You've documented that you didn't do the thing the contract required. It's still better than a clean signature, because it stops anyone claiming you counted and agreed, and plenty of reps will honour a same-day call on goodwill. But goodwill is not a system. Treat "unchecked" as damage limitation for the days it all goes wrong, not as your standard practice.

The five-minute doorstep routine

• Count containers against the delivery note, not against the invoice and not against your memory of the order. The note is the document you're signing; make it true before you sign it.
• Check sizes, not just counts. Eleven kegs on the note and eleven on the ground can still be £60 short if one of them is a 30-litre where you're billed for a 50. Same for a pin standing where a firkin should be.
• Open split or mixed cases rather than counting the cardboard. A sealed case is a fair assumption; a taped-up one isn't.
• Glance at best-before dates on anything you know is slow. Short-dated stock is tomorrow's wastage line arriving today.
• Look for leakers and damage while the driver's still there, because damage claims run on the same windows as shortages.
• Write every discrepancy on the note itself before signing, on both copies, and photograph yours. "1 x 50L Madri billed, not delivered" in biro on a signed note is the sentence that wins the credit.

Five minutes. The driver won't love it, but it's part of the job, and drivers with accurate loads have nothing to wait for.

Empties are money too

The paperwork runs both ways. The kegs and casks going back on the wagon carry credits, and containers that vanish are a real industry problem: the trade press was putting keg and cask losses at around £50m a year as far back as 2010, which is an old figure now, but the direction of it hasn't changed. Count your empties onto the wagon the same way you count stock off it, get the count on the ticket, and if someone turns up to collect empties outside a normal delivery, ask for ID, because only authorised crews collect.

What a signed-short delivery does to your stocktake

Here's the sum that makes this a stocktaking article and not just a paperwork moan. Say an 11-gallon keg, about 88 pints, is on the invoice at £160 (illustrative price) but never came off the wagon, and it got signed for.

Your stock system works out expected closing stock as opening, plus purchases, minus sales. Purchases now says 88 pints arrived. Nobody can sell them, so at the next count the line is 88 pints down with not a single till transaction to explain it. On a £5,000 ex-VAT week that one keg reads as roughly three points off your wet GP, my arithmetic, and it looks exactly like someone's carrying beer out the back door. I've written before about the order to suspect things in when the till and the stocktake disagree, and paperwork sits near the top of that list precisely because of deliveries like this. Check documents before you so much as think about people.

Finding it at the stocktake instead

If the doorstep moment is gone and the variance has already surfaced, work backwards. Pull every delivery note since the last count and match them line by line against the invoices. You're looking for goods invoiced that no note shows arriving, notes with quantities amended in biro that never became credits, and prices that moved mid-period, which is its own kind of leak.

This is also the job that scanning delivery notes as they arrive was built for. StockTap's Scan Delivery Note reads the note, drafts the entries, and you approve them, so what's in your stock system is what physically arrived rather than what the invoice claims. Do that and an invoice-versus-delivery gap surfaces the week it happens, while the claim window might still be open, instead of at month end when it definitely isn't. I've covered that workflow in the delivery note scanning guide.

Either way, ring the rep with dates and the paperwork even if the window's shut. Suppliers void claims, not patterns. If the same drop is light twice, you want it on record, and most reps would rather fix a depot picking problem than lose an account over it.

Common questions

The driver won't wait while I count. What then?

Under terms like HT's, an unchecked signature can kill any claim, so the honest answer is that the count is the driver's cost of doing business and you should make it quick, not skip it. If it truly can't happen, write "not checked, driver unable to wait" on both copies, photograph the load where it stands, and phone the shortage through the same day. Then raise the routine with your rep, because a delivery slot that never allows five minutes for checking is a term worth renegotiating.

The delivery note and the invoice don't match. Which one wins?

The note records what arrived; the invoice records what you're being charged. When they differ, the annotated note is your evidence and the invoice is what needs correcting. Reconcile the two weekly rather than letting a month of them pile up.

Can I refuse a short delivery entirely?

Section 30 says yes, you can reject the lot, or accept what came and pay at the contract rate for that. In practice a credit plus a top-up drop usually serves a trading pub better than sending beer away on principle. The rejection right is your lever, not your routine.

A keg was leaking when it landed. Whose problem is it?

Report it at the doorstep and get it on the note, same as a shortage; supplier terms treat damage claims on the same clock, and Primo's terms above name breakages and damages explicitly. A photo of the wet floor under the keg settles most arguments before they start.