Every shipment that leaves your facility has four documents tied to it. Get any one wrong and the deduction lands two weeks later.
The four
- Packing slip. The label on the package. Marketplace, AWB, buyer name and address, SKU, quantity, courier barcode.
- Customer invoice. The GST-compliant invoice the buyer opens. Your GSTIN, buyer’s address, items, taxes, total.
- Vendor invoice. The invoice you raise on the marketplace. The marketplace settles you against this.
- Manifest line. The line in the daily manifest tying everything to the courier handoff.
What goes wrong
Three classes of mismatch:
Quantity drift. The vendor invoice says 2 units; the customer invoice and slip say 3 units. Marketplace pays for 2; you ate the cost of 1. This is the silent-loss vector #2 from the deductions piece.
SKU drift. The slip has SKU red-XL but the actual packed item is red-L. Slip looks right, package is wrong. Buyer returns. Deduction.
GSTIN mismatch. Customer invoice has the wrong GSTIN — usually a fat-finger error somewhere upstream. Buyer flags the invoice. Marketplace adjudicates. Sometimes a deduction, sometimes not.
How the pipeline catches them
Robnu generates all four documents from one canonical order record. The order has SKU, confirmed quantity, GSTIN, buyer address, taxes — and every document renders from those fields.
This means: if the vendor invoice and customer invoice are different on quantity, it’s because someone manually edited one of them. Robnu flags it immediately at stage 9.
If the slip SKU and the manifest SKU drift, the pipeline catches it before the manifest closes. You can either correct it (re-pack with the right SKU) or pull the shipment from the batch (close without it).
Where stage 9 actually lives
Stage 9 of the 11-stage flow is the document pipeline. It runs after slips are generated (stage 7) and invoices are accepted (stage 8). Its job is reconciliation, not generation — the documents already exist by the time stage 9 runs.
Reconciliation rules:
- Quantity on slip = quantity on customer invoice = quantity on vendor invoice
- SKU on slip = SKU on customer invoice = SKU on vendor invoice
- AWB on slip = AWB on manifest line
- GSTIN on customer invoice = the canonical seller GSTIN
Anything that fails reconciliation goes into a “needs attention” queue before manifest closure.
What this gives you on the dispute side
When a deduction lands later — say, two weeks after closure — the dispute filing needs evidence. The document pipeline keeps slip + customer invoice + vendor invoice + manifest tied to the order.
A few keystrokes pull up the evidence pack. Sized correctly for the marketplace’s dispute UI. Pre-attached to the dispute filing.
Read more
- Process — Process pillar
- Glossary: packing slip — the slip in detail
- Glossary: vendor invoice — vendor invoice mechanics