A delivery note travels with a consignment and states what is being delivered — and Docyield's parser turns that statement into structured rows you can match against an order. It captures the document number, the date, the sender and recipient, the delivery address, the related order reference, every delivered line item with its quantity and unit, and any notes. Upload a delivery note or delivery order as a PDF or photo and get CSV, Excel, or JSON back, ready to reconcile.
Sometimes called a delivery order or dispatch note, this document is the sender's declaration of what is in the consignment, handed over with the goods. It is the sheet a receiving clerk checks items against on arrival. Docyield reads its line-item table as a clean list and keeps the order reference distinct from the document's own number, so the data lands ready to tie back to the purchase order it fulfils.
What a delivery note is and its role
A delivery note accompanies goods from supplier to customer and itemises what the consignment contains. Unlike an invoice, it typically carries no prices — its purpose is to let the receiver verify that the right goods, in the right quantities, have turned up. It is prepared by the sender and is normally the document a receiving team marks up if something is short or wrong before signing for the delivery.
In the order-to-delivery flow, the delivery note follows the purchase order and precedes the invoice. The receiver checks the noted line items against what physically arrived, references the order to confirm it is the right consignment, and uses any discrepancy notes to raise a query before payment. Getting those line items into a system quickly is what lets a goods-in process confirm a delivery without a manual line-by-line tick.
Why structured extraction beats manual checking
Receiving against a paper delivery note is a slow, error-prone ritual: read a line, find it on screen or on the shelf, tick it off, repeat. When the note is then filed as a scan, the data is locked in an image. Extracting the line items as structured rows lets you compare the delivered quantities against the purchase order automatically, surfacing shortfalls and overages instead of trusting a hand tick.
OCR by itself only flattens the note into text. You would still have to split descriptions from quantities and units, and pick the order reference out from the document number. Docyield returns each line as its own record with named fields, so a system can match delivered items to PO lines directly — no further parsing, no guessing which number means what.
Who uses a delivery note parser
- Goods-in and warehouse teams confirming deliveries against purchase orders.
- Procurement and ops teams tracking what suppliers actually delivered versus ordered.
- 3PLs and distributors logging dispatched consignments across many customers.
- Finance teams using delivery notes as the three-way match link between PO and invoice.
- Retail and inventory teams updating stock from delivered quantities.
- ERP integrations that need delivered line items captured automatically.
Accuracy, missing fields, and review
We do not advertise a flawless rate, and there is no honest way to. Docyield is designed to be accurate on clear delivery notes and forthright about the difficult ones. Where a field such as the unit of measure or the order reference is simply not on the note, it comes back empty — never invented — because a guessed quantity would defeat the entire point of reconciling a delivery.
Image quality decides how clean the line items read, especially on carbon-copy or thermal notes that fade. A sharp scan reads well; a faint duplicate or a crumpled photo is harder. For the minority that arrive degraded, the source stays beside the extracted rows so a quick human check can confirm the quantities before they update inventory or trigger a match.
Line items, units, and order matching
The line-item table is the working heart of a delivery note, and Docyield reads each row with its description, quantity, and unit of measure. Keeping the unit alongside the quantity matters: a quantity of 12 means something different when the unit is 'cases' versus 'each', and preserving both keeps the reconciliation honest.
Because the order reference is captured as its own field, separate from the delivery note's own number, the consignment can be tied straight back to the purchase order it fulfils. That is what enables a clean three-way match later — purchase order to delivery note to invoice — with the delivery note providing the evidence of what was actually received.
Fitting into a goods-in workflow
On the receiving dock, a delivery note is the first record that something has arrived, and capturing it as data turns an arrival into an entry your systems can act on. Extracting the sender, the date, the order reference, and the delivered quantities lets a warehouse log the receipt, update stock, and start the check against what was expected without anyone retyping the docket into a screen.
That speed matters most when goods and paperwork move together all day. A scanned or photographed note can be processed the moment it lands, so discrepancies — a short delivery, a wrong reference, an item that was never ordered — surface while the driver is still there rather than days later when the paper finally reaches the office. The structured output slots into stock and ERP systems as clean fields, which is what makes same-day reconciliation practical.
Output formats, API, and batch
Each parse exports as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the same result, and delivery notes default to CSV because the line items are naturally tabular — easy to drop into a spreadsheet or import to an ERP. JSON suits developers feeding deliveries into an application, and XML fits legacy feeds. The free tool handles one note at a time, which covers ad-hoc goods-in checks.
For a distribution operation receiving many notes a day, the same extraction runs through the Docyield API and batch dashboard, with webhooks and your own validation rules. The schema in the free tool is what the API returns, so a reconciliation workflow built on the line-item fields keeps working unchanged as you move from manual uploads to an automated pipeline.
Delivery note versus invoice and proof of delivery
These three documents bracket a delivery but do different jobs. A delivery note lists what is being delivered and goes out with the goods, usually without prices. An invoice states the amounts owed and is what accounting acts on. A proof of delivery is signed by the receiver and is evidence that the handover happened. A dedicated delivery-note parser keeps the focus on the dispatched line items and the order link, rather than the financial fields of an invoice or the signature focus of a POD.
What the delivery note parser extracts
Each delivery note is returned against a fixed schema. Fields absent from a document come back empty rather than guessed.
- Document number
- The delivery note or delivery order number.
- Date
- The date shown on the delivery note.
- Sender
- The sender or supplier of the goods.
- Recipient
- The recipient or customer.
- Delivery address
- The address where the goods are to be delivered.
- Order reference
- The related purchase order or reference.
- Items
- Each delivered line, with description, quantity, and unit of measure.
- Notes
- Any additional notes or remarks on the document.
How to convert a delivery note to CSV, Excel, or JSON
- 1Upload your delivery note — drop a PDF, PNG, JPG, or WEBP onto the box above, or click to choose a file.
- 2Wait a few seconds while Docyield reads the document and pulls out the line items.
- 3Review the structured rows and check the quantities and order reference against the original.
- 4Choose your output tab — CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.
- 5Copy the result or download the file, ready to reconcile against your purchase order.
Frequently asked questions
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Batch upload, an extraction API, and webhooks for 100+ documents a month.