Purchase returns

A Purchase Return ships already-received items back to a vendor — for defective goods, wrong deliveries, or excess stock — and removes them from on-hand inventory. It is created manually with New Purchase Return from a Purchase Order that has at least one line with a Received quantity greater than zero.

Purchase Return and Return Pick are independent commands on the same Purchase Order, not a parent/child pair. Confirming or validating one does not create the other. Use New Return Pick first only if the items you’re returning have already been put away by a Restock and need to be pulled back out of their storage location to the receiving area; use New Purchase Return to actually ship items — from the receiving area — back to the vendor. If items were received but never restocked, you can return them with just a Purchase Return.

Document fields

Field	Description
Number	Auto-generated identifier.
Purchase Order	The order the returned items were received against.
Scheduled Date	Defaults to the PO’s Expected Arrival date.
Weight	Total weight of the return’s lines; calculated, editable.
Status	See Status flow below.

Line fields

Field	Description
Item	The item being returned.
UoM	Unit of measure for the line.
Ordered / Received / Restocked	Quantities carried over from the PO line, for reference.
Quantity to Return	Amount to ship back on this line.

There’s no per-line Reason, Reference/RMA, or Condition field on the return document itself — capture that context in the Purchase Order’s Terms & Conditions or Vendor Reference instead, or in a comment on the return.

Status flow

Status	Description
Draft	Being prepared. No inventory impact.
Waiting	Marked ready, but the receiving location doesn’t currently hold enough of the item to cover every line.
Ready	Every line is available to ship.
Done	Validated. Items leave on-hand inventory and the PO’s Received total decreases by the returned quantity.
Cancelled	Discarded. No inventory impact.

The action buttons are Mark as Todo / Check Availability (both move toward Ready) and Validate (Ready → Done).

What validating a return does

Decreases the item’s on-hand physical_quantity and the linked PO line’s Received total by the returned quantity, and recalculates the item’s weighted-average cost. If the item was flagged to obsolete once its quantity reaches zero and this return does that, its status changes to Obsolete.

For a Service Order, the same return document works in reverse: it pushes the returned quantity back into service_quantity instead of removing it from inventory, and resets any serialized items involved to Under service — useful for rejecting a bad regrind after it’s already been received back in.

Related articles

• Purchase orders
• Purchase receipts
• Service orders
• Purchase restocks