Warehouse Receiving With a Phone Scanner: Check Deliveries Against the PO

You can run warehouse receiving with the phone in your pocket: import the purchase order into DataScan as a lookup list, scan each carton at the dock to confirm it belongs to the PO, count quantities as you go, and export a receiving report your buyer or ERP can use. Shortages and wrong items get caught while the driver is still there — not three weeks later during a count.

The goods-in gap

Receiving is where inventory accuracy is won or lost. If a short shipment gets booked in at the ordered quantity, every count afterwards inherits the error — and the window for claiming against the supplier closes quietly. Yet most small and mid-size warehouses still receive against a paper PO: tick marks on a printout, a quantity scribbled in a margin, and a data-entry session afterwards where the margins get misread.

The enterprise fix is a WMS with directed receiving on rugged handhelds, which is exactly right for operations doing dozens of inbound trucks a day — and overkill below that. The middle path: a phone that knows what the PO contains and tells you, scan by scan, whether what is coming off the truck matches it.

Goods-in scanning with a phone: step by step

1. Get the purchase order as a CSV Export the PO lines — item barcode, description, ordered quantity — from your purchasing system, or build the file from the supplier's order confirmation. Any spreadsheet saved as CSV works; this takes two minutes at a desk before the truck arrives.
2. Import the list into DataScan's Lookup database Load the CSV into the app. Each barcode now carries its associated fields — description, ordered quantity, supplier — and the whole list lives on the phone, so it works at a dock with no Wi-Fi.
3. Verify cartons with Lookup Scan As the truck unloads, scan each carton or item label in Lookup Scan mode. A match shows the item's details instantly — you know what it is and how many were ordered without touching the paperwork. An unknown barcode means the item is not on this PO: set it aside now, before it vanishes into the racking and becomes next month's mystery stock.
4. Count quantities with Single Value Scan For the actual receipt, run a Single Value Scan session named after the PO number (PO-4711 2026-07-10): scan the item, count the units, type the quantity. Where something is wrong — crushed carton, broken seal, wrong variant — switch the item to Multiple Value Scan and attach a note; it lands in its own column in the export.
5. Export the receiving report Export the session as CSV or Excel: one row per item with barcode, received quantity, notes, and a timestamp. Email it through your own SMTP server to the buyer, upload it via SFTP for your ERP's import routine, or share the file directly. Headers are configurable once, so the report arrives in the format your system expects.
6. Reconcile against the PO In Excel, a VLOOKUP by barcode puts received next to ordered; a variance column and a filter for non-zero rows produce the exception list. Shortages and off-PO items go to the supplier claim with scan timestamps as evidence — filed the same day, while the delivery is still traceable.

Partial deliveries, backorders, and multi-truck POs

Real purchase orders rarely arrive in one clean truck. The session-per-PO pattern absorbs this without ceremony: when the first partial delivery lands, its session records what actually arrived; when the balance turns up next week, a second session against the same PO number covers the rest. In the reconciliation sheet, summing received quantities across both files by barcode gives the running total against the ordered quantity — the still-open remainder is your live backorder list, with timestamps proving which truck brought what. No status flags to maintain, no system to update mid-dock: just files that add up.

Receiving habits that pay for themselves

• One session per PO. Name sessions after the PO number and the files reconcile themselves — and a partial delivery simply becomes a second session against the same PO.
• Count before putting away. Once cartons are in the racking, a shortage is unprovable. The scan timestamps document that the count happened at receipt.
• Photograph damage, note it in the scan. The note travels in the export; the photo stays on the phone as backup for the claim.
• Filter to the label types you receive. Restricting scanning to Code 128 and EAN keeps the camera from locking onto QR codes printed elsewhere on the carton.
• Same file, next stop. If received goods go straight into containers or onto pallets, the One-to-Many packing guide continues where receiving ends.

Other ways to handle receiving

Honest alternatives: a WMS with directed receiving on rugged handhelds posts receipts live against the PO and tells workers where to put things away — the right answer for high-volume, multi-dock operations that can justify the licensing and integration project. Supplier ASN/EDI workflows automate the paperwork entirely, if both sides run compatible systems. Paper receiving costs nothing and silently taxes every count that follows. The phone loop sits in between: PO verification and structured receiving data at app-subscription cost. The receiving report feeds your system as a file — the ERP CSV import guide covers that handoff, and the database verification guide goes deeper on Lookup mode itself. New to the app? Start at the DataScan overview — the 7-day free trial includes Lookup and all other modes, so you can verify your next delivery before paying anything.