What belongs on a delivery note?
Unlike the invoice, a delivery note (usually) contains no prices, just the delivered items. Useful details are:
- sender (your shop) and the customer's delivery address
- order or delivery note number and date
- the delivered items with quantities
- optionally a reference to the related invoice
As a pick list it helps your warehouse with picking; as an insert in the parcel it builds trust with the customer.
Delivery notes in Shopify: your options
Manually from the order data
You can open the order and type out or copy the line items. With a few parcels a day that works – once the afternoon shipping rush hits, it becomes tedious, and you won't get a consistent layout this way.
With an app – individually and as a bulk print
Much more practical: an app that automatically creates a delivery note in a consistent design for every order, which you print individually or as a bulk print for many orders at once. That's exactly what Belegio does.
With Belegio: create and print delivery notes automatically
Besides invoices, Belegio also creates delivery notes automatically from your Shopify orders – with your logo and brand color, based on one of six layouts. You can choose a different layout for the delivery note than for the invoice.
Here's how:
- Install Belegio from the Shopify App Store.
- Set up company details + design: import your master data from Shopify with one click, upload your logo and brand color, pick a layout in the live preview.
- Print delivery notes: open individual orders in the Shopify admin and generate the delivery note – or select several orders and output all delivery notes at once via bulk print.
Because Belegio works right in the admin, you stay in your usual order workflow – no export, no copying back and forth.
Print several delivery notes at once
As soon as more than a handful of parcels go out each day, you don't want to open every order individually. That's what batch printing is for: you select several orders in the Shopify admin and output all related documents in one go.
- Select the orders you want in the admin.
- Start the batch print.
- All delivery notes are output together as one PDF.
A practical tip from everyday work: print the delivery notes in the same order in which you pack the parcels. If you print everything first and sort afterwards, you lose the time the batch print saved you.
Pick list, delivery note, invoice – what's what?
The three terms get mixed up, but they serve different purposes:
| Document | For whom | Contains prices? |
|---|---|---|
| Pick list (Packzettel) | Your warehouse, for picking | No, often no customer address either |
| Delivery note | The customer, as an insert in the parcel | Usually not |
| Invoice | The customer and their accounting | Yes, with tax shown |
In English-speaking countries the delivery note is also called a “packing slip”, which doesn't make the confusion any smaller – it usually means exactly the document that comes with the parcel.
Do you have to keep delivery notes?
A delivery note is not an accounting record in terms of VAT law – the mandatory tax details under § 14 UStG (German VAT Act) belong on the invoice, not on the delivery note. Even so, it is a business letter (Handelsbrief), and business letters are subject to a retention period under § 147 AO (German Fiscal Code).
In practice this matters mainly when the delivery note carries details that appear nowhere else – such as different delivered quantities or a delivery date that differs from the invoice date. How long and in what form you need to keep it is best clarified with your tax advisor; the periods differ depending on whether a document is classed as an accounting record or as a business letter.
Note: This article is a general overview and does not replace tax advice. Legal status: August 2026.
By the way, the delivery note also gets its own running number, separate from the invoice number. This isn't a legal requirement, but it makes matching easier day to day: if a customer calls about a missing item, they quote the number from the slip in the parcel – and you immediately find the right shipment, not just the order.
Delivery note and invoice from a single source
The big advantage: Belegio covers the entire document workflow. For the same order you automatically create:
- the invoice (on receipt of payment, tax-correct – DE 19/7 %, small-business scheme (Kleinunternehmerregelung), OSS, reverse charge)
- the delivery note for packing and enclosing
- an automatic credit note for refunds, if you want one
So everything fits together: the same numbering logic, the same design, no media breaks.
Partial shipments: one parcel, but not the whole order
Not every order ships in one parcel. If an item is out of stock, you send the rest ahead – and the delivery note should then only contain what's actually in the box.
Shopify handles this through partial fulfillments: you fulfill the available items and leave the rest open. A delivery note that rigidly lists every order item will then mislead the customer – they'll look for items that aren't even on their way yet. So make sure to create the delivery note for each individual shipment and not for the order as a whole.
This doesn't apply to the invoice in the same way, by the way: it follows the receipt of payment, not the shipment, and usually covers the whole order.
When you don't need a delivery note at all
A delivery note isn't required by law – it's a trade custom, not a mandatory document. There are cases where you can safely leave it out:
- digital products, where there's nothing to pack
- shipments with a single, unambiguous item
- shops that put the invoice in the parcel anyway – it serves the same purpose
On the other hand, it pays off as soon as there are several items in the parcel, partial shipments occur or your warehouse needs a way to check while packing. And it saves you from putting the prices in the recipient's parcel – a solid argument for gift shipments.
Shipping abroad: customs tariff number and country of origin
If you ship to countries outside the EU, customs requires details on the type and origin of the goods. The customs tariff number – the six- to eleven-digit HS code – describes what's in the shipment; the country of origin states where it was made.
You maintain both in Shopify directly on the product or variant. Belegio takes the details from there and shows them on the documents, including the delivery note. This doesn't replace a customs declaration or a CN23 form – those go on the parcel and come from your shipping carrier. But it saves you looking things up when filling in the forms, and the recipient sees the details on the enclosed document.
If the codes are missing in Shopify, the column simply stays empty instead of printing a made-up value.
International shipments? Automatically in your customer's language
If you ship to other EU countries, Belegio automatically creates the documents in your customer's language – German, English, French, Dutch, Italian or Spanish. That makes the delivery note easy to understand for international recipients too.
