Refunds & returns on invoice orders

Company orders go through the same refund, return and cancellation flows as retail orders. The difference appears when the order was placed on terms — due when invoiced, Net 7–90, due on fulfillment or due on delivery, including the unpaid remainder after a deposit. Such an order carries an unpaid invoice balance, and money that was never collected cannot be sent back as cash. Instead, the refund can credit the invoice balance.

The two ways a company refund settles

When you refund a terms order, the Refund dialog offers both, alone or in combination:

• Credit invoice balance — a tick in the dialog. It writes a credit note against the unpaid invoice: the amount the company owes goes down and no money moves. This is the normal path for a return on an order that has not been paid yet.
• Cash refund — returns money the company has actually paid, through the original payment. This covers the settled portion of the order, such as a deposit.

The dialog shows how much can be credited and how much would go out as cash, so you are never guessing. The credit portion is capped at the order’s live outstanding balance; you cannot credit an invoice below zero, and two overlapping refunds cannot jointly over-credit it. Anything above the live balance goes out as cash.

Example. Kapoor Apparel returns ₹35,000 of a ₹2,00,000 Net 30 order they have not paid yet. You refund with Credit invoice balance ticked. Their invoice becomes ₹1,65,000, no money leaves your account, and ₹35,000 of the branch’s credit limit is freed the same moment.

Note

A company refund never creates personal store credit for the buyer — that balance belongs to the person, not to their employer. It cannot create a spendable location balance either: location store credit is a recorded goodwill figure, not a tender, so an order can never have been paid from it. Credit the invoice or refund the cash, and record any goodwill separately.

Returns

Returns on company orders follow your normal returns flow — request or create the return, approve it, receive the items back, then refund. The only difference is the settlement step above: on an unpaid invoice order, the refund that closes the return is usually an invoice-balance credit rather than a cash movement.

A Location admin can file a return on a colleague’s order at their own branch. A plain Buyer can only act on their own orders — see buyer roles.

Cancellations

Canceling all or part of an unpaid terms order reduces the outstanding invoice balance by the canceled amount, through the same audited credit mechanism. A full cancellation of a fully unpaid order brings the balance to zero — the invoice simply has nothing left to collect. Any portion that had already been paid, such as a deposit, is returned as a cash refund as usual.

Where the money story lives

Every invoice movement is kept as an append-only ledger on the order: the original charge, payments you recorded, credit notes, cash refunds and any write-off. The balance you see is always explainable, and the branch’s total outstanding exposure — the figure its credit limit is checked against — is the sum of its orders’ live balances, updated with every entry.

Writing an invoice off is a different action from refunding it: a write-off declares the money uncollectible and never moves anything. See writing off a bad debt.