Not every movement of goods is a sale. Material goes out to a job worker for polishing and comes back. A carton goes to a customer on approval and half of it comes back. Stock moves from the shop to the godown across town. In none of those cases has anything been sold yet, so there is nothing to invoice — but the goods are on a truck, and something has to travel with them.
The improvised version, and why it goes wrong
Most small businesses handle this with a hand-written slip, a WhatsApp message, or nothing at all. It works right up until it doesn't: three months later nobody can say how much material is sitting at the job worker's premises, whether the approval stock was returned or quietly sold, or why the godown count and the shop count disagree by eleven units.
What the document actually has to carry
Strip away the format and the content is always the same four things:
- Who is sending and who is receiving — and they may not be a customer at all. A job worker is usually a vendor.
- What is going, in enough detail to identify it when it comes back — description, quantity, unit.
- Why it is going, because that is what decides whether you should expect it back.
- How it is travelling — vehicle, transporter, document number, distance.
The value of the goods is on there too. Nothing has been sold, so nobody is paying that number — it is there because the goods are worth something and the paperwork that follows the truck needs to say what.
The field that does the most work
The reason for the movement. Job work and approval sales are movements where the goods are expected to come back; a transfer to your own godown is not. That single choice is what tells you, months later, which outstanding movements are a problem and which are just stock in a different building.
How this looks in BizGST Pro
One screen. Pick the reason, and if it is a reason where goods come back, a return-date field appears on its own; pick one where they don't, and it goes away. The party can be a customer or a vendor, chosen with one button, because the same document serves both directions. Line items compute their value as you type, and the transport block — vehicle, mode, transporter, LR number, distance — sits underneath on the same page.
And afterwards
A saved challan can be used as the source for an e-way bill, which picks up the party, the line items and the value from it rather than asking for them again. The transport details are entered on the e-way bill itself; they are not carried across today.
The split you do not choose
Whether the value is shown as CGST and SGST or as IGST is not a setting. It follows from your state and the other party's state, and the product works it out. If that surprises you, it is the single most useful thing to understand about how any of this arithmetic works — and it is the same rule on an invoice.
What this article does not cover
When a challan is legally required rather than merely useful, what must be printed on it, how many copies travel, or how any of it is treated for tax. Those are set by rules that change and that we will not quote from memory — the GST portal and your accountant are the sources. What is above is about keeping track of your own goods, which is your problem either way.