Cancellation, Returns, Credits and Refunds

You have a few options for reverting a Sale, depending on the exact nature of the reversion.

Cancellation

If you need to completely reverse the sale and don't need to 'preserve history', the sale can be completely cancelled. Although the cancelled Sale will be visible on the system, all corresponding Journal Entries will disappear, meaning the audit trail for payments would be gone. Furthermore, there would be no tracking/record of stock going out and coming back in.

Only use cancellations in the simplest case where a Sale is either entered erroneously or immediately reversed - for example, the customer changes their mind even before payment is made. Once payment is made and stock is removed from the premises it will always be more accurate/auditable to credit and refund.

Returns, Credits and Refunds

Once payment has been made and the customer has taken the goods away, the process for taking stock back, crediting and refunding is essentially no different to the case where the originating sales transaction was an Order.

Returns

Use a Return to accept items back into stock. Although all the stages of the Return will not apply if the customer is returning the items in person, you have the full power and flexibilty of Returns to allow you to accept all items on the Sale, or only some of them, and choose whether they need to go back into stock or are going to be discarded.

Note that the customerfield on a Return is optional, but you will probably need to create a record for a customer returning items if you are then going to credit them.

Credits

Creating a credit is a necessary next step, even if you intend to direectly refund the customer. By using a Credit you get the full power of the credit system, meaning you can either refund, or the customer can use the credit as full or partial payment towards a different Order

Note that customer credit cannot be 'used' on Sales, only Orders. This is because Sales are always considered 'Paid', so there is no possibility of applying credits.

Refunds

If you intend to refund the customer, you'll need to create a Credit first, as described above, and then refund the Credit.