Every out-of-gauge inbound starts with a photo and a phone call

A pallet warehouse can be run from a barcode. An out-of-gauge yard cannot. The transformer on the lowbed does not have a label. The turbine blade is 60 metres long and arrives on two trailers. The crate from the project forwarder says "1 of 14" and the packing list is in the truck driver's phone.

Receiving OOG cargo is a human act: someone walks out, looks, photographs, measures, argues with the driver about whether the lifting points are where the drawing says, and phones the office. The paperwork is downstream of that, and it is where the money leaks.

What the paperwork needs to say

For every inbound the yard needs, at minimum:

• What arrived: description, pieces, dimensions, weight, condition, photos
• Whose it is, and which enquiry or job it belongs to
• When it arrived, so storage starts on the right day
• What it cost to receive: the crane, the labour, the truck waiting time
• The documents: delivery note, packing list, weighbridge ticket, gate pass, and in a free zone the K2 or ZB form

That record is the Goods Receipt Note. Everything after it depends on it: the storage charge accrues from its date, the outbound GIN reconciles against its pieces, the invoice is built from its charges. Get the GRN wrong and every document downstream inherits the error.

Why it goes wrong

The GRN is written after the fact, by someone who was not in the yard, from a WhatsApp thread and a folder of photos. Dimensions get transcribed. Piece counts get assumed. The weighbridge ticket is filed separately and never linked. The crane hire invoice arrives a week later and is booked to overheads because nobody remembers which job it was for.

Storage is the biggest leak. If the GRN date is wrong by three days, the customer gets three days free on a per-cbm-per-day charge that was quoted tight to win the job.

Reading the yard's own record

More forms will not fix it. The yard already produces the record, as photos, a delivery note and a few messages. Reading that record into the GRN, instead of retyping it, does.

A photo of the delivery note gives the consignor, the description and the declared pieces. A photo of the weighbridge ticket gives the weight and the time. The WhatsApp thread gives what the yard actually saw: "14 crates, one with a cracked skid, photos attached". The enquiry the job was quoted against gives the charges and the storage tariff.

Read together, that is a draft GRN with the date, the pieces, the weight and the documents attached. The yard supervisor confirms it from their phone. Storage starts on the day the truck came through the gate, because that is what the weighbridge ticket says.

The outbound is the mirror. The GIN reconciles against the GRN's pieces, the gate pass is generated, the crane and transport buy prices are placed on the job, and the invoice is drafted from what actually happened rather than what was quoted.

The quote should know the yard

There is one more consequence. When every job's charges are kept as buy and sell per line, the next quote for a similar job starts from real numbers: what the 250-tonne crane actually cost, what the lowbed actually charged, how many days the last transformer actually sat.

OOG quoting is often a guess dressed up as a tariff. Sourced buy prices turn it back into a quote.