How to Cancel an Order?

Sometimes customers decide to cancel their orders, or the received items may not meet their expectations, prompting them to request a return or exchange. This article explains how to process such orders.

Written by Владислав Пономарь

Updated 3 days ago

The need to cancel an order can arise for various reasons. In Key CRM, this process can generally be divided into two types:

Simply canceling an order;
Processing partial returns or cancellations with re-shipment of items.

Order Cancellation

The simplest scenario involves moving the order through the pipeline to one of the statuses in the Canceled group.

Once an order is moved to a cancelled status:

All payments in the order will be marked as Canceled, but if certain payments are not refundable, you can manually add them back;
Expenses will not be canceled, but since canceled orders are excluded from analytics, these expenses won’t appear in financial reports;
All data from the order will be excluded from analytics (only the count and percentage of canceled orders will be visible);
Any written-off items will immediately be returned to stock;
All tasks created for the order will be marked as completed.

Tips for managing cancelled orders:

Create different statuses within the Canceled group (e.g., return, exchange, defect, customer refusal) and assign orders accordingly to track reasons and quantities of cancellations.
To ensure that non-refundable expenses that you incurred irrevocably when processing such an order, are not lost in analytics, we recommend moving them to general expenses.
To monitor whether refunds have been issued for canceled orders, use tags. For example, create a tag like Refunded and add it to orders after processing the refund.

Partial Returns and Orders with Re-Shipments

If a customer wants to return one of the items they received or if you need to send them replacement items, these scenarios can be handled in a few ways depending on your requirements.

First Scenario

If you don’t need to retain information about the returned items or the original order:

Edit the order by removing the returned items. Analytics for the order will automatically adjust, and the removed items will be returned to stock;
To balance the payment status, you can either cancel the original payment and add a new one accounting for the refund, or simply add the refund amount as an expense.

Second Scenario

If you need to keep an order information and track the returned items, create a copy of an order:

Create a copy of the order. In the original order, remove the item the customer is returning, and in the copy, retain only the returned item. Write-off the returned item in the copied order until it arrives back at your stock.
Add the tracking code for the return shipment to the copied order. Note that if you have automation rules set up for status changes based on delivery updates, these will function as they do for regular orders.
Tag the order (e.g., Return) to ensure it gets moved to the Canceled status after the item is received, or set up a trigger in automation to handle this change automatically.

Third Scenario

If you need to track the returned item and send a replacement to the customer:

Follow all steps from Second Scenario to handle the return;
Then create another copy of the order where you can add the new item(s) and process it like a regular order.

These scenarios can be adapted to suit your workflow. We've outlined some possible approaches and how to use them effectively.

Tags: cancel, cancellation, exchange, refund, returned item, refused on delivery, return processing

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