GUIDE · PROOF OF DELIVERY · KENYA

What actually counts as proof of delivery?

A signature is not automatically proof, and a photograph of a delivery note is not automatically a record. This is what a defensible proof of delivery contains, why client submissions get rejected, and how to capture it without asking your drivers to learn anything.

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01 / WHAT A VALID POD CONTAINS

Six fields, and the one everybody forgets.

There is no single legal template in Kenya. What makes a proof of delivery defensible is whether it lets a third party reconstruct, months later, that these goods reached this recipient on this date in this condition.

In practice that means six things — and the one most often missing is the recipient’s printed name, because a signature alone rarely identifies anybody.

01
Delivery note number
The reference that ties the document back to a specific job and dispatch record.
02
Date of delivery
Not the date of dispatch and not the date the note was written up afterwards.
03
Recipient name, printed
The field most often left blank and the one that most often sinks a dispute. A signature identifies nobody if you cannot read it.
04
Signature, and a stamp where required
Many corporate clients require a company stamp as well. Whether yours does is a question to settle before the delivery, not after.
05
Quantities received
Confirmed against what was dispatched. A short delivery accepted without being noted becomes your problem later.
06
Condition remarks
Damage or shortage noted at the point of handover, when the recipient is standing there, rather than claimed afterwards.

02 / WHY SUBMISSIONS GET REJECTED

Different clients want different proof. Nobody wrote it down.

This is the single largest source of rejected submissions in distribution work, and it is almost entirely avoidable.

One client requires a stamp. Another requires confirmed quantities against the order. Another requires photographs of the goods at handover, or the original note returned rather than a copy. These requirements are real, they differ, and in most operations they exist only in the memory of whoever has dealt with that client longest.

The fix is not more diligence. It is recording each client’s requirement once, and checking each delivery against the right one instead of against a general sense of what usually suffices.

03 / CAPTURING IT WITHOUT AN APP

The photograph your driver already takes.

Most proof-of-delivery projects in this market fail on driver adoption. A new app means a download, a login, a training session, a phone that can run it and a habit that survives a bad week. Usually it does not.

The alternative is to collect what drivers already do. A photograph of the signed note sent to a WhatsApp number requires no download, no login and no new behaviour — and it produces the same artefact, at the same moment, with a timestamp attached.

What has to happen next is the part worth building: extracting the fields from that photograph, attaching it to the right open job, and checking it against what that particular client requires — while the truck may still be reachable and a defect can still be corrected.

01
No app, no login, no training
If a change requires a driver to learn something, expect it to fail in week three.
02
Check on the day, not at submission
A missing signature caught the same afternoon is a phone call. Caught at submission, it is a write-off.
03
Hold the note rather than guess the job
A delivery note that cannot be tied to an open job with confidence should be held, not attached to the nearest plausible one.
04
Keep the evidence retrievable
A dispute six weeks later should take seconds to answer, not an afternoon of searching.

04 / WHERE VERIDOM COMES IN

This is what the Delivery Desk does.

It receives the photograph over WhatsApp, extracts the delivery note number, date, recipient name, signature, quantities and condition remarks, and attaches it to the correct open job.

It holds an evidence requirement set per client, checks each delivery against the right one, and turns a failure into a named defect with a named owner and a correction window rather than a note in a pile.

And when a client says a delivery never happened, the complete evidence and timeline for that job come back immediately. One workflow, live in fourteen days, measured for thirty.

QUESTIONS

Proof of delivery questions.

Ask anything not covered here on WhatsApp. You will get a straight answer.

01What counts as valid proof of delivery in Kenya?

There is no single statutory template. In practice a defensible proof of delivery carries the delivery note number, the date of delivery, the recipient’s printed name, a signature and where required a company stamp, the quantities received checked against dispatch, and any condition remarks noted at handover. The test is whether a third party could reconstruct the delivery from it months later.

02Is a photograph of a signed delivery note acceptable as proof?

For most commercial purposes yes, provided the fields are legible and it can be tied to a specific job. Some clients contractually require the original returned, which is a requirement to establish before the delivery rather than discover at submission. What matters more than the format is whether the photograph is attached to the right job and checked while correction is still possible.

03Why do clients reject proof of delivery submissions?

Most commonly a missing recipient name, an illegible or absent signature, a quantity that does not match the order, or a requirement specific to that client — a stamp, photographs of the goods, the original note — that nobody had written down. Different clients want different proof, and in most operations that knowledge lives in somebody’s head.

04How long should we keep proof of delivery records?

Long enough to cover the period in which a client can dispute an invoice or a delivery, and long enough to satisfy your own tax record-keeping obligations, which in Kenya generally means several years. Practically: keep them for as long as you keep the invoices they support, retrievable rather than merely stored.

05Can we collect proof of delivery over WhatsApp?

Yes, and for most Kenyan operations it is the only approach with a realistic chance of adoption, because drivers already do it informally. The work is not the collecting — it is extracting the fields, attaching the evidence to the correct job, and checking it against that client’s requirements before the opportunity to correct a defect has passed.

06Do we need a driver app for proof of delivery?

No, and requiring one is the most common reason these deployments fail here. A driver app means a download, a login, training and a habit that has to survive a bad week. The Delivery Desk deliberately requires nothing of the driver beyond the photograph he already sends.

ONE WORKFLOW · LIVE IN 14 DAYS · MEASURED FOR 30

Make every delivery provable.

Thirty minutes with whoever handles deliveries and client submissions is enough to scope the first implementation and tell you which of your rejections are avoidable. You keep the workflow map either way.

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NAIROBI, KENYA · FIXED-SCOPE IMPLEMENTATION · ONE WORKFLOW AT A TIME