Return

Because a sale can be undone, and the system that recorded the sale has to be able to record its reversal without pretending the original never happened.

Returns are where a business finds out what it actually sold. They sit at the intersection of inventory, accounting and customer trust, and they are the process most often designed last and used first. The reason codes are the valuable part: a return rate by product, by customer, by batch is quality data arriving free, and most businesses throw it away by recording returns as a bare quantity.

• A return moves stock and adjusts money, and the two are separate decisions — goods can come back without a full refund, and a credit can be issued without goods returning.
• Returned stock must land in a known condition state. Putting damaged goods back into sellable inventory is how a return becomes a second complaint.
• A return references the original delivery or invoice. One that references nothing is an unexplained stock increase.

The return path is designed for the tidy case — undamaged goods, full credit, straight back to stock — and then meets reality, where most returns are partial, damaged, out of window, or all three. Staff work around the tidy path with manual adjustments, and within months the stock ledger and the physical count disagree by roughly the volume of returns.

• Return of an item whose price has since changed — credit at the original price, not the current one.
• Partial return where the credit is not proportional, because the reason is damage rather than rejection.
• Returns after the GST credit-note window has closed, where the tax cannot be recovered even though the goods came back.
• Customer returns something never sold to them, which is a receiving problem rather than a returns one.
• Returned goods that go to scrap — stock increases and immediately decreases, and both movements need recording.