Goods received not invoiced is the accrued liability for deliveries already received but not yet billed, held in an interim account until the invoice arrives.
Goods received not invoiced, usually shortened to GRNI, is the value of items or services a company has taken delivery of but for which no supplier invoice has been posted yet. Accounting requires the cost and the corresponding liability to be recognised when control passes, which is at receipt, not when the paperwork catches up, so the amount is parked in an interim or accrual account. When the invoice finally arrives and is matched, the interim entry reverses and the real payable takes its place. Other names for the same balance are accrued purchases, uninvoiced receipts and, in some systems, the GR/IR account.
Without this mechanism, the period in which a cost lands depends on how quickly each supplier decides to bill, which makes monthly margins move for reasons that have nothing to do with the business. The balance is also one of the better diagnostics of purchase to pay hygiene: an ageing GRNI balance usually means receipts recorded for deliveries that were later returned, invoices posted as standalone documents instead of against their receipt so the cost is counted twice, or orders left open forever. Auditors look at it for both directions of error, understated liabilities on one side, overstated inventory or cost on the other.
In Business Central the mechanism is native for inventory items when expected cost posting to the general ledger is switched on in Inventory Setup. Posting a receipt then creates interim entries using the interim accounts defined in Inventory Posting Setup and General Posting Setup, and posting the invoice reverses them and books the actual cost. For lines that are not inventory items, typically G/L account lines and services, no interim posting is created, so those accruals have to be made manually with a reversing general journal entry at period end. To size the exposure, purchase order lines carry quantity received not invoiced and amount received not invoiced, which can be added to the order line view, and reconciliation means comparing the interim account balance against the sum of those amounts across open orders. Business Central does not ship a single GRNI ageing report that performs that reconciliation for you.
Example: 500 units are received from a components vendor on 28 September at CHF 24.00, so CHF 12,000 sits in the interim account at month end. The invoice arrives on 6 October at CHF 24.60, so CHF 12,300. Posting it reverses the CHF 12,000 interim entry and books the actual CHF 12,300, with the CHF 300 difference landing as cost according to the costing setup. Had the receipt not been posted in September, the entire CHF 12,000 would have fallen into October and the September result would have been overstated by that amount.
The most common way this goes wrong is invoices keyed as standalone purchase invoices rather than pulled from the posted receipt, which leaves the receipt open in GRNI forever while the cost is recognised a second time; the balance then grows quietly and nobody wants to own the clean up. Partial receipts, over receipts and returns processed without reversing the receipt produce the same residue. Teams that manage it age the balance by receipt date, review everything older than sixty days line by line each month, and watch the value concentrated in the ten largest open orders, since a handful of lines usually explains most of the total.
GRNI is a specific kind of accrued expense: the accrual arises from a recorded goods or service receipt rather than from an estimate. General accruals cover costs incurred with no receipt document at all, such as an audit fee for work already performed.
Almost always because receipts are never closed out: the invoice was entered as a standalone document instead of against the receipt, the order stayed open after a partial delivery, or a return was processed without reversing the receipt. Ageing the balance by receipt date shows which of the three dominates.
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