Because the person signing it is not the person who agreed the price. A delivery order is checked and signed by whoever is standing at the loading bay — a storeman, a site foreman, sometimes a security guard. Putting your rates on a sheet that passes through those hands sends your commercial terms to everybody who opens the carton, and it invites an argument about pricing with someone who has no authority over it. That is why this tool has no price field anywhere: it cannot print money even if you wanted it to.

A delivery order proves that goods physically moved and were received. An invoice asks for money for them. They usually carry the same line items and almost nothing else in common: the delivery order has quantities, a vehicle, and a signature from the receiver; the invoice has prices, tax and payment terms, and is signed by nobody. Many businesses issue one delivery order per drop and one invoice per month covering all of them.

In everyday use, yes — “delivery order”, “delivery note”, “despatch note” and “D/O” all describe the document that travels with the goods and gets signed on receipt. The wording varies by company and by country rather than by function. A separate meaning exists in shipping, where a delivery order is an instruction from a carrier releasing cargo at a port; that is a different document and this tool does not produce it.

Enter the real figure in Delivered and leave the ordered quantity as it was. The document then prints a short-delivery box listing each line and the exact gap, and the delivered figure appears in bold in the table. There is also a “Balance to follow” field for the promise about the rest. The point of doing it this way is that the shortage is signed for at the door, rather than discovered by an accounts clerk two weeks later when nobody can remember what came off the lorry.

There is no tick box, and that is deliberate. Partial delivery is worked out from the numbers you enter: if any line delivers less than it ordered, the document says so. A tick box someone forgets to tick is exactly the failure that turns into a dispute, and a tick box someone ticks while the quantities all match would make the document contradict itself.

Three is the usual arrangement and it is what this tool sets up: one stays with the customer, one comes back to your office signed, and one stays with the driver. That mirrors the three-ply carbonless pads many suppliers still use. Add, rename or delete labels freely — delete them all and you get a single unlabelled copy.

No. Quantities are handled to three decimal places, so 2.5 kg and 0.75 m are fine. They are also totalled as whole thousandths internally rather than as decimals, which is why three lines of 2.5 kg total exactly 7.5 and not 7.499999999999999. You can also type a word instead of a number — “1 pallet, mixed” is a perfectly ordinary delivery order line. Lines without a number are printed as typed and simply do not join the totals.

Because 12 cartons plus 4 kilograms is not 16 of anything. Adding a whole quantity column gives a number that looks authoritative and means nothing, so the totals box lists one figure per unit — 12 ctn, 4 kg — using the spelling you typed. Lines with no unit at all are grouped together under “Units” rather than dropped, because a quantity that vanishes from the total looks like an arithmetic bug.

Your own, yes — the delivered-by signature and your company stamp both take an upload, and both are kept with your saved profile so you are not re-attaching them every delivery. The received-by side deliberately does not, and that is the one upload this site refuses while offering it elsewhere: a signature the supplier already holds before the customer has seen the document proves precisely nothing, and that signature is the whole evidential point of the sheet. It prints as a ruled line for a pen.

The document is assembled in your browser and nothing is sent over the network — the site is static files with no server behind it. One thing is kept, and only when you ask for it: pressing Save profile stores your own company details, your copy labels and your print options in this browser, so it stays in your browser and goes when you clear your browser data. Your own signature image and company stamp are kept the same way, because they are yours and they do not change. The customer, the addresses, the goods and the received-by signature are never written to storage, because every delivery order goes somewhere different and warehouse computers are shared.

It proves the goods arrived and were accepted in the quantities written on it, which is usually the fact in dispute. What is owed comes from the order or contract and is claimed by the invoice. The two work together: keep the signed copy, and reference the delivery order number on the invoice so the customer’s office can match them without phoning you.