Spirits, wine and beer carry a Kenyan excise stamp, and on an item flagged for it nobody can book the stock in without saying whether the stamps were there.
What this rule is for
Kenya's excise stamp (EGMS) sits on every bottle of spirits and wine, on beer, and on several non-alcoholic lines. Unstamped stock is illegal to hold, and it is the ordinary channel for counterfeit spirits. A stock system that quietly books a counterfeit delivery as a genuine one is worse than no system.
So there is one question at the delivery bay, asked only about the products it is owed on, and the answer decides whether the stock may reach the ledger.
Which items ask the question
An item carries a checkbox, Every unit carries an excise stamp, next to Active in the item dialog. Its hint says what ticking it does: "Receiving this item asks whoever is at the delivery bay whether the stamps were there, and will not post the stock without an answer."
Editing the flag needs manage_items, which the Procurement Officer and Admin roles hold. Unlike the measurement fields beside it, the flag stays editable however old the item is: the excise schedule is the law's to change, not the item's.
The item importer reads it too, from an optional column called requires_excise_stamp with yes or no in it. A file without that column leaves every item unflagged, which is what a restaurant with no bar wants.
Nothing changes for an unflagged item, anywhere. That is the point: a question asked about a bag of rice is a question people learn to answer without looking, and then the one that matters gets waved through too.
What the receiver answers
On the receive form, a flagged line gets a third control beside Delivered and Rejected. On the web it is a small picker with three options: Not answered, Stamps present, No stamps. Unflagged lines simply read "Not required". On the phone the same three states are two chips, Yes, stamped and No stamps, with untouched meaning nobody has answered yet.
Three states rather than a checkbox, because a checkbox has two and one of them would be a lie. A control that started at "no stamps" would have the app asserting, on every flagged line nobody touched, that the delivery arrived unstamped.
What "no stamps" means
On a delivery, answering no is allowed, and it means the whole delivered quantity on that line goes back on the lorry, with a reason. Nothing on that line may be accepted: "Bottega Gin 750ml (ITM-0142) was recorded as arriving without excise stamps, so none of it may be accepted. Reject the whole delivered quantity on that line, or correct the stamp answer." The reason is required as well, because the rejection is the record that unstamped goods were turned away, and the reason is the supplier conversation.
On a cash or market purchase, answering no is not possible at all. A cash purchase has no rejected quantity, so there is nowhere for the refusal to live, and the answer is simply that the purchase cannot be recorded: "Unstamped stock cannot be bought, and a cash purchase has no rejected quantity to record the refusal against. Leave the goods with the trader rather than recording the purchase."
No answer at all on a flagged line is refused by name: "Bottega Gin 750ml (ITM-0142) carries an excise stamp, so somebody has to say whether the stamps were there. Answer the excise stamp question on that line and record it again."
The check runs at the moment the stock becomes real: when a goods receipt posts, and when a cash purchase is captured, since a market purchase posts as it is captured. It does not run when you save a half-filled draft, because refusing there would mean a delivery cannot be entered and come back to, which is how a partly entered delivery gets finished on paper instead.
The web form and the phone both block the submit for the same reasons in the same words, so you find out at the bay with the driver still there rather than that evening when the queue syncs.
Where the answer shows afterwards
On the goods receipt and on the cash purchase, under the item's name: Stamps confirmed, or No stamps in a warning colour.
Where nobody was asked, nothing is printed. Silence rather than "not required", because printing anything would be asserting something about the product's regulatory status that the row does not know. The words appear only where somebody actually answered.
Why this may block a delivery when an integration never does
Bohari's standing rule is that an integration failure must never stop a delivery being recorded. eTIMS being down is not the storekeeper's fault, the goods are in the building either way, and a ledger that refuses to admit them is worse than one that admits them unreconciled.
None of that applies here. This is not a third party. It is a human attestation by the person standing at the bay with the crate in front of them. There is nobody to wait for, the answer is a look, and what is being prevented is unstamped spirits entering a legal stock record.
Who can do what
| Grant | What it allows | Seeded to |
|---|---|---|
manage_items | Flag an item as carrying an excise stamp | Procurement Officer, Admin |
receive_goods | Answer the question on a delivery | Storekeeper, Bar Manager, Outlet Manager, Admin |
capture_cash_purchase | Answer it on a market purchase | Storekeeper, Chef / Kitchen Lead, Bar Manager, Outlet Manager, Admin |
See Roles & Permissions, Purchase Orders for receiving, and Cash Purchases.
FAQ
We flagged our spirits and now an old delivery on somebody's phone will not send. It syncs, the server refuses it because the flagged line carries no answer, and it lands in the phone's refused captures with the reason. Open it, answer the question, and send it again. Nothing is refused until a tenant flags an item, so turning the flag on strands nothing that was already queued unanswered on an unflagged item.
The driver brought stamped and unstamped bottles of the same product in one delivery. That is two lines' worth of fact on one line, and the line is the unit the rule works on. Reject the whole line with the reason, then take the stamped bottles on a second delivery or a second receipt against the same order.
Somebody ticked "stamps present" on a bag of rice. It is stored as they answered it and changes nothing. It is harmless evidence that somebody looked, and refusing it would make an app that ticks the box on every line fail for a reason nobody can act on.
Why is there no supplier-level setting for this? Because the stamp is a fact about the product, not about who sold it. The same distributor delivers stamped spirits and unstamped soft drinks on one lorry.
A supplier gave us free spirits as a promotion. Does the question get asked? Not today. A free issue captured through the stock capture path carries no line attestation, and the door for it is note based. It is recorded as a known gap rather than pretended otherwise.