I frequently receive feedback from users regarding the difficulty and time-consuming nature of correcting errors in a Purchase Receipt. While we have the option to cancel and re-submit the receipt, it’s often not feasible because some quantity may have already been consumed.
While we can create a Stock Entry or Reconciliation to address inventory discrepancies, these changes do not reflect in the purchase reports tied to the original receipt.
I believe the system would benefit from a more streamlined way to correct Purchase Receipts. Specifically, I would like to suggest the addition of a new doctype—Purchase Receipt Correction. This new document could be linked to the original Purchase Receipt, allowing users to make corrections (such as adjusting quantities or price or adding new items) while maintaining a traceable history.
I think this notion of correction document could also be applied to multiple other submittable documents.
This word “consumed” betrays that a value is taken out of its natural context and put elsewhere, while not linking back (and forth) correctly.
This makes any correction (of the document where it came from) immediately a mess (regarding the natural networked structure of the flow of data), which has to be tracked manually.
This “natural networked structure of the flow of data” links any action to more or less the whole society. Think about it! An error at some point can ripple through to your tax declaration, make it transit beyond some artificial tax law regime limit and put your enterprise in a totally different tax category altogether, which might even effect the budget of a state, etc.
So at some point one needs to be able to correctly produce a filled-in form and hit “submit” and that’s it.
On the other hand, errors happen everywhere, so a means of correction is nice and also human.
But it’s not easy to strike the right balance.
And always, somebody needs to build the additional automation needed.
I agree that making small corrections can be tedious. Your idea of a Purchase Receipt Correction makes sense.
My company is allowing negative stock balance, so normally Cancel + Amend works fine. In cases where we don’t want to do that, we perform either Stock Entries or Stock Counts (custom code).
That being said, having clear links and traceable history is not a high prioirty for us yet. I definitely see your point and like the idea.
Thanks for your thoughts—it’s true that maintaining data integrity and traceability is important. But let me share some scenarios that I frequently encounter:
A user submits a Purchase Receipt with the following:
Item A: qty 50 @ $1
Item B: qty 50 @ $1
Later, Item B is consumed in manufacturing.
Then they realize an error:
They meant to select Item C instead of Item A, or
They received 60 (or 40) units of Item A, not 50, or
The correct unit price for Item A was $1.25, not $1.00
At this point, they can’t cancel the PR, because Item B has been consumed. Their only option is a workaround: Stock Reconciliation or other entries. But those don’t reflect in purchase analytics or reports linked to the original PR.
So they come back to me asking: “Why is it so hard to fix a simple mistake? Why can’t I just correct the document?”
And honestly, I empathize.
We’re not talking about modifying a Purchase Invoice or audited document—just the Purchase Receipt, which should ideally support a safe and auditable correction process.
Errors are common, especially when users are still getting familiar with the ERP. This kind of rigid behavior can quickly become a show-stopper—especially for non-technical users.