How to receive a delivery

Receiving is the step that turns an order into stock. It writes to your live Shopify store, so the whole flow is built around telling you exactly what will change before it changes.

Before you start

Receiving needs the purchase order update permission. Receive shipment is unavailable on an order with no products and on a closed order.

If your Shopify connection predates the permission to write stock, you get an amber warning that Shopify stock will not update. You are never blocked from booking the delivery in; Tideswell records it and the Shopify half can be retried after reconnecting. See How to manage integrations, your workspace name and the audit log.

How do you receive a shipment?

Receive shipment opens the delivery line by line, each pre-filled with what is still owed.

You can also type quantities into the table's Receive qty column first, and the dialog picks them up. That is quicker when you are working down a packing list.

Record damaged units separately from received ones, and record freight and duty for the delivery.

Then confirm through a red Update Shopify stock? screen that lists precisely what will change. Nothing is written until you agree to it.

Quantities have to be whole numbers. A mistyped "12.5" blocks the save rather than quietly becoming nothing.

Why record damaged units separately?

Because damaged stock is not sellable and is still owed by the supplier.

Recording ten received and two damaged keeps both facts. Your Shopify stock goes up by ten, and the two remain outstanding on the order rather than disappearing into a received total.

Why record freight and duty?

Because they are what turn unit cost into landed cost, which is the real cost of the goods.

Freight and duty are spread across the lines of that delivery, and the landed cost column then becomes meaningful, per How to add products and choose your columns.

Both are optional. They cannot be edited later, and the dialog says so up front, so it is worth having the invoice to hand before you confirm.

Where does the stock go?

To the Shopify location set as Receive to on the order's Properties panel. Left unset, it goes to the first location that ships inventory.

Set it when you have more than one warehouse. The picker is hidden entirely when Shopify offers no shippable location.

What is the receipt history?

A table of every delivery against the order: when, who, how many units, what it cost, and whether it was Applied, Pending or Failed, with any error.

A receipt is a permanent record and cannot be edited afterwards. That is what makes it worth trusting.

Applied means the stock change reached Shopify. Failed means it did not, and those can be retried with their own confirmation. Retrying is blocked on a closed order, so reopen it first.

A receipt written before cost capture existed shows "Not recorded" rather than a false zero.

Can I double-count by clicking twice?

No. The same delivery is recognised and reported back as "Already recorded, no double count."

That applies to a retry as well, which is what makes retrying a failed receipt safe.

How do you close an order short?

Close short, when the rest is never coming. It records that you have stopped chasing the remainder.

It writes the remainder off in Tideswell only and does not change Shopify stock, which is correct: goods that never arrived were never in your stock.

Reopen reverses it if you were wrong. Close short only appears on a partly received order and Reopen only on a closed one, so you never see both.

Closing short counts in the supplier's delivery record and never counts as on time. See How to record new terms and check a delivery record.

What if a product is not tracked in Shopify?

It is recorded in Tideswell only, and you are told how many lines that applied to.

Nothing is lost: the order shows the delivery correctly, and only the Shopify stock figure is unaffected because Shopify is not counting that item.

What does Tideswell not do here?

It owns the order and what arrived against it, rather than the shipment in between. There is no container or transfer to track.

For fixing a count that is simply wrong rather than recording a delivery, use the stock correction on the inventory screen instead. See How to work out a restock cost and correct a stock count.