Everything that happens between a truck arriving at your docks and finishing unloading generates information that’s critical to your operation: who delivered what, when, in what condition, and with what issues. When that information is collected by hand and scattered across paper delivery notes, WhatsApp messages and spreadsheets, incoming goods control stops being a process and becomes a source of errors, delays and disputes with suppliers.
Having exhaustive control over goods receiving — from the carrier’s arrival to departure — isn’t an operational luxury. It’s what lets you make purchasing, staffing and space decisions based on real data instead of guesswork.
What the goods receiving process actually involves
Receiving goods isn’t a single step, it’s a sequence of tasks worth mapping out before you digitise it:
- Planning and shipment information — what’s arriving, how much and when, before the truck even reaches the dock.
- Managing the assigned loading/unloading dock — which dock, which time slot, with what resources (forklifts, staff) booked.
- Unloading the goods and logging the operation in real time.
- Quality control of the received goods, recording any issue (breakage, shortage, wrong reference).
- Identification and placement of the goods in the warehouse, closing the loop.
How smoothly this process runs directly conditions everything that follows, including production if you depend on those materials to manufacture.
What you need under control on every delivery
Regardless of your sector, there’s information your team needs to have and control on every shipment for receiving to be genuinely efficient:
- Delivery forecast. Knowing in advance when a shipment will arrive lets you plan staff and resources, and avoid trucks piling up at peak times. A time-slot booking calendar, managed by the carrier themselves, removes most of this uncertainty.
- Carrier and vehicle data. Plate number, driver and haulier must be logged systematically — not just for operational control, but because in Spain these are among the fields required by the new electronic Administrative Control Document (DeCA), mandatory from 5 October 2026.
- Detail of the goods received: nature, references, packages and weight, checked against what was recorded in the booking or order.
- Issues at the point of unloading: any deviation — breakage, shortage, delay, documentation error — needs to be logged the moment it happens, not reconstructed from memory at the end of the day.
- Full traceability, with a date and time for every step of the process, so you can audit exactly what happened if a dispute arises with a supplier or carrier.
Why paper and loose spreadsheets no longer cut it
When these five points are managed manually, the same problems keep recurring: there’s no reliable way to anticipate the day’s workload, issues get logged (if at all) hours after they happen, and reconstructing what happened with a specific shipment means digging through different documents and asking different people.
On top of that, legal responsibility for what happens during loading and unloading is increasingly falling on the receiving company, which means well-documented incoming goods control is no longer just an efficiency question — it’s a compliance one too.
How specialised dock management software solves this
A yard management system like Slot’s Eyes tackles all five points from a single interface:
- Advance time-slot bookings, managed by the carrier themselves, giving real visibility of the day’s workload before it even starts.
- Real-time logging of every checkpoint: arrival, start of unloading, end, departure.
- Customisable quality checklists that staff fill in as soon as unloading finishes, capturing any issue immediately.
- Auto-filled transport data (carrier, plate, driver) straight from the booking, with no double entry, and already structured to generate the DeCA for each shipment.
- Auditable history, with a date and time for every event, accessible from a single platform instead of scattered across delivery notes and emails.
The result is a complete, real-time view of everything happening at your docks, and a reliable dataset to analyse where your actual bottlenecks are.
Want to see incoming goods control in action in Slot’s Eyes? [Request a free demo.]