Your order says ten. The vendor calls to say they can send six this month and the rest is out of stock indefinitely. The obvious move — open the order, change 10 to 6, save — is the one that costs you the record.
In short
- Where
- Purchase order → ⋯ → Cancel items
- To undo
- ⋯ → Reopen cancelled items
- Takes
- Under three minutes
- Does not apply to
- Quantity already billed — that is a debit note
What editing the quantity destroys
An order is a record of an agreement. Change 10 to 6 and the document now says you asked for six, which is not what happened. Three months later, when somebody asks why this vendor keeps being late, the evidence has been overwritten one order at a time.
Cancelling items keeps both numbers. Ordered: 10. Cancelled: 4. Open: 0. The arithmetic still works, the history survives, and the vendor’s record shows a pattern rather than a series of small orders that all happened to be for exactly what arrived.
Step by step
Open the order
Procurement → Purchase orders, then the order in question. It should be Open or Partially billed.
⋯ → Cancel items
The option is not offered on a draft. A draft has not been placed with anybody, so there is nothing to call off — just edit the quantities.
Tick the lines, set the quantities
Tick each line you are dropping. Set a quantity where only part of a line goes; leave it blank to cancel everything still open on that line. Lines with nothing open are shown but cannot be picked.
Say why
“Out of stock until November.” “Price increased, sourcing elsewhere.” It stays on the line and in the history. This is the field people skip and later wish they had not.
Save
If anything is still open the order stays live and can go on being billed. If nothing is left, it becomes Closed — finished, rather than open forever waiting for goods nobody is sending.
The bit that trips people up. Anything already billed cannot be cancelled here. That money is on a bill and a bill is a document the vendor also holds — undoing it is a debit note, not a quiet edit on your side. Only the unbilled quantity is offered.
Putting them back
Vendors change their minds. ⋯ → Reopen cancelled items returns the cancelled quantity to the order, and an order that closed only because everything on it had been called off goes back to Open.
One thing that cannot be undone: cancelling the whole order. That is the move for when a vendor turns the order down outright, it keeps the number and the record, and there is no way back — you raise a new order instead. And an order with part of it already billed cannot be cancelled at all, because the bill would be left pointing at something that never happened.
Common questions
Can I cancel something that has already been billed?
No. That money is on a bill, and unbilling it is a debit note rather than a cancellation. Only the quantity still open is offered.
Can I put cancelled items back?
Yes — ⋯ → Reopen cancelled items. An order that closed only because everything on it had been called off becomes Open again.
What is the difference between cancelling items and cancelling the order?
Cancelling items drops part and leaves the rest live. Cancelling the order withdraws the whole thing and cannot be undone.
Why not just reduce the quantity on the line?
Because the order said ten and somebody agreed to ten. An order that quietly becomes six has lost the fact that four were dropped, when, and why.
Next
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