The general rule of thumb is that upon posting a record in Business Central, it becomes unamendable. However, in particular cases, users can amend or undo posted orders. Let’s take a look at when that’s possible with purchase and sale related-documents, and how you can go about doing it.
Towards the end we’ll also touch on whether it’s possible to undo lines on posted purchase returns and transfer orders as they are two areas people are often interested in.
Sales shipments
Users can undo sales shipment postings. This even applies in situations where the shipment was sold from a location using Advanced warehousing. I’ll start by covering sales shipments, before mentioning the additional factors for consideration Advanced warehousing adds.
What if I have posted the sales invoice?
Before I show you how to do this, it’s worth noting that if you have invoiced the sales order to which the shipment relates, this option won’t be available. In that scenario, using a sales credit memo would allow you to bring the stock back in and return to square one.
Undoing posted sales shipments
If you only post ‘shipment’ on a sales order, you can undo it. The sales shipment is tied to the sales order, and the posted document is created upon posting that element. To undo the shipment, on the sales order click ‘Navigate’ and ‘Shipments’. On the Posted Sales Shipments screen, click into the relevant record. In the ‘Lines’ area, click ‘Functions’ and ‘Undo Shipment’.
This corrects the sales shipment by adding additional lines with negative quantities, counterbalancing the initial shipment’s quantity.
Below is an example of a Posted Sales Shipment record after you click ‘Undo Shipment’ to help explain this:
The Location and Bin Code value you have set against your sales order will determine where the stock gets brought back into. To check this is the case, I can use the Bin Contents page.
Using the Bin Contents page to see stock adjustments
On the Item Card for the relevant record, you can access the Bin Contents. Within the Bin Contents page, I can navigate to the relevant Location and Bin Code combination line. On that specific line, by clicking into the value in the ‘Quantity (Base)’, I can see the Warehouse Entries screen.
By doing so, I can see that for my sales order (Source No. 101229), I can see there’s been both a negative but also a subsequent positive adjustment. This tells me the stock has been received from the exact bin and location it was shipped from initially.
How undoing shipments affects invoicing
Another point to mention is you can’t post the invoice for the record with an undone sales shipment as the value would be for £0. As you can see, Business Central doesn’t allow for £0 invoices:
Advanced warehousing: deleting outbound records prior to posting
Before I illustrate this next section, I should clarify this applies to locations with Advanced warehousing functionality, but not full WMS. To see the setup on a Location Card which matches this description, look below:
If you use Advanced warehousing, you create warehouse shipments from sales orders. This separates out the shipment and invoicing. If you realise there’s been an error prior to posting a Warehouse Shipment, simply delete the pick (if one’s been made) and Warehouse Shipment. Another scenario could be that you have created and registered a pick and are yet to post the warehouse shipment. In this case, you can’t delete the pick. Instead, just delete the Warehouse Shipment.
Undoing posted sales shipments when using Advanced warehousing
Now lets look at instances where the warehouse shipment’s been posted. When you are using Advanced warehousing and click ‘Undo Shipment’ on a Posted Sales Shipment, the goods will be placed back in the designated shipping bin in the warehouse location. As you know, to fulfil a warehouse shipment, the goods must be picked. Those goods after being picked are placed in the shipping area. With this in mind, when you undo the shipment, they go back there.
In this case, if you want to move the stock out of the shipping bin and back into general storage, we must essentially reverse the process we used to put the goods in the shipping bin initially. That is, unless you want to keep the goods here. To go about moving those goods back to storage, create an Internal Movement record. You can’t use a Warehouse Put-away record for this movement.
On the Internal Movement record, in the From Bin Code, we can see the quantity available includes the number in the posted sales shipment we undid. We’ll be covering internal movements in more detail soon. If you’d like to learn about Advanced warehousing, click here to read our guide.
How to delete the amended posted records
After undoing the Posted Sales Shipment record, regardless of whether you are using Advanced warehousing or not, you can delete it. You can also delete the sales order record it stems from. Let’s start by looking at how to delete the Posted Sales Shipment record and why you might choose to do that.
Deleting a Posted Sales Shipment record
To delete the Posted Sales Shipment record, you first must print a copy of the document. This can be done by simply downloading a PDF of the record. To do this, click ‘Print/Send’, ‘Print’, and ‘Send to…’ where you’ll recieve the options below:
After you do this, you can delete the posted record. Note that if you delete a posted record, the ledger entries relating to the deleted shipment will still exist. Those cannot be deleted.
The benefit of deleting a Posted Sales Shipment record is that it means your original sales order will have its Qty. to Ship field repopulated with the figure it had when the order was first made. This means you can essentially re-ship the goods, as the shipment you did initially has been balanced out by undoing it. So if you posted a sales shipment before it left the warehouse, you could undo this and post it again when you actually ship the goods.
Deleting the sales order
If you don’t wish to re-ship the goods, you likely don’t want the sales order record anymore. If you clicked ‘Undo Shipment’ on the posted sales order, you can delete the sales order. You can’t delete a sales order if the Qty. Shipped Not Invoiced field is zero.
So whilst you don’t need to delete the Posted Sales Shipment to delete the sales order, you do need to make sure you have used ‘Undo Shipment’.
Purchase order receipts
When a purchase order hasn’t been fully posted (receipt and invoice), the record will remain on the Purchase Orders page. If the goods have only been receipted on the system, you can undo it. This might be where you haven’t actually received the goods but accidentally clicked ‘Post Receive’. On the purchase order, click ‘Navigate’ and ‘Receipts’. This will take you to the Posted Purchase Receipts screen. By clicking into the relevant record, you can then click ‘More options’, ‘Functions’ and ‘Undo Receipt’.
This will provide a prompt, asking whether you wish to undo the selected receipt lines. When you’re happy, click ‘Yes’. The result of doing this will be like the sales shipment before; you will get an additional line counterbalancing the initial quantity receipted.
Undoing purchase receipts when using Advanced warehousing
With Advanced warehousing, you create a Warehouse Receipt directly from the inbound order. If prior to posting that warehouse receipt, you realise there’s an issue, you can simply delete the record. However, as we are focusing on undoing postings, let’s assume that the warehouse receipt has been posted. I’m going to list three examples of scenarios that could unfold, below. The biggest thing to take from this is that the timing of when you realise there’s been a mistake is important; you can only undo an order if the stock’s not been put away.
Scenario one: undoing a warehouse receipt when a put-away has been created
If you are using Advanced warehousing configuration, the put-away is created as a result of posting a warehouse receipt. After posting the warehouse receipt document, unless the put-away is deleted, you won’t be able to undo the receipt. To test this, go to the Posted Purchase Receipts page. See below for a quick of way of navigating there from the purchase order document:
On the posted purchase receipt record, click ‘Functions’ and ‘Undo receipt’ in the Lines section, you will get this message:
Scenario two: undoing a warehouse receipt after registering the put-away
If you register the put-away, you won’t be able to undo the receipt. On a posted purchase receipt, if you click ‘Functions’ and ‘Undo receipt’, you will get this message:
Scenario three: undoing a purchase receipt after deleting the warehouse receipt
So what if you delete the Warehouse Put-away record after posting the warehouse receipt? If you do this, you can undo the posted warehouse receipt.
Much like with sales shipments, when you undo an order, you will get additional lines balancing out the quantity disparity. You can delete the posted warehouse receipt at this stage. You can also delete the purchase order at this stage if want to.
We have several posts dedicated to warehousing. To take a look at all of our warehousing blogs, follow the link.
Posted purchase return receipts
Fortunately, posted purchase return receipts are quite simple to manage. If you want to undo one, it’s as simple as clicking ‘Functions’ and ‘Undo Return Shipment’.
As we’ve seen previously, if you post both the shipment and invoice, you will not be able to undo the shipment. You will get this message:
Transfer orders
Before I finish, I thought I should mention transfers. You can’t undo lines on a posted transfer shipment or a posted transfer receipt record. So once the goods have been shipped, the order must be fulfilled and then managed afterwards.
To resolve this, you could just transfer them back afterwards or employ an Item Reclassification Journal.
Closing remarks
Thanks for taking the time to read this. We’ll soon be posting a guide on your available options when trying to undo posted assembly and production orders, so stay tuned for that. As always, if you’d like to contact us, you can do so by clicking here. To never miss when we post, follow us on LinkedIn.