Sales Return (Internal)

Take back goods a customer returns after an invoice or cash bill. Finalising puts the quantity back into stock at moving-average cost, reverses the sale and reduces what the customer owes, and finance then settles the credit by refund or contra. If nothing physical comes back, use a Sales Credit Note instead.

Overview

The Sales Return (Internal) applet records goods a customer brings back after a Sales Invoice or POS cash bill. Sales or customer-service staff create it, the warehouse receives the goods against it, and finance settles it — by refund on the Payment tab, by contra against the customer’s open invoices, or by a separate Sales Refund Note. On FINAL the return puts the quantity back into stock at moving-average cost, reverses the sale to the Sales Return account and reduces what the customer owes. If nothing physical comes back, use Sales Credit Note (Internal) instead.

Where it fits

Screens and menus

Route root: applets/tnt/wavelet/erp/internal-sales-return-applet/.

The create / edit form

Tabs, in the default order (re-orderable under Default Selection): Search, Main Details, E-Invoice, Account, Lines, ARAP, Delivery Details, Payment, Payment Adjustment, Department Hdr, TraceDocument, Contra, Doc Link, Attachments, Export. Search is available on create; E-Invoice, ARAP, Payment Adjustment, TraceDocument, Contra and Doc Link appear once the document is saved.

Screenshot withdrawn; a recapture from a demo tenant is on the list.

Settings menu

The menu also carries Feature Visibility, the permission screens (listings, Client-Side Permission, Permission Wizard), Release Notes and the Applet Log, the shared screens every applet has.

Configuration

Before you can use it

Applet settings

Default Selection (settings/default-selection)

Application Settings (settings/field-settings) — behaviour toggles this applet reads (off unless stated):

Read with no control on any settings screen — these take effect only if support has stored the key in the applet’s settings JSON. Two of them move dates and money: AUTO_UPDATE_TXN_DATE_ON_FINAL re-dates the return to today with a save made before the Final is requested, so a refused Final leaves the draft re-dated; AUTO_SETTLE_CONTRA shows the Auto Settle control on the Contra tab. The rest: DEFAULT_CUST_TYPE, DEFAULT_COUNTRY, DEFAULT_CURRENCY pre-fill a customer created from the return (corporate when unset); ENABLE_DRAFT_LOCK_SERIAL_NUMBER_CHECKING asks the server, as a serial line is saved, whether another draft already holds it; SHOW_DOCUMENT_DELETE_BUTTON, HIDE_CLONE_BUTTON, HIDE_SEND_EMAIL_BUTTON, HIDE_SELECT_FROM_ANOTHER_CUSTOMER_BUTTON, DEFAULT_STATUS, FUZZY_SEARCH_COLUMNS, DISABLE_ITEM_LISTING and the four department hides (HIDE_SEGMENT, HIDE_DIMENSION, HIDE_PROFIT_CENTER, HIDE_PROJECT).

The other switches on Application Settings hide or expand a field, a column, a tab or a button. Each one’s whole effect is on your screen the moment you flip it, so they are not listed here.

Keys in the model with no control anywhere: ENABLE_CUSTOM_STATUS_*, department/tax INCLUDE_* / ENABLE_* flags. Five that look like that are not: DEFAULT_DELIVERY_BRANCH / DEFAULT_DELIVERY_LOCATION are set on Personalization → Default Selection and read by Main Details; DEFAULT_ORIENTATION / DEFAULT_TOGGLE_COLUMN are read by the split create and edit screens; PRINTABLE is the listing’s print default and the export tab’s fallback printable.

Document behaviour settings

Feature visibility / permissions

API: TNT_API_DOC_INTERNAL_SALES_RETURN_{CREATE,READ,UPDATE,DELETE}_TGT_GUID.

Client-side permissions registered for this applet (45):

The app also reads SHOW_INTERCOMPANY_MENU and SHOW_FILE_EXPORT_MENU, which are not registered for this applet (see Troubleshooting).

Fields

Main Details

Account: Entity ID (required); billing and shipping contacts and addresses (edits persist on save); Intercompany. The entity cannot be changed once lines are linked to a sales invoice.

Lines (txn_type = PNS)

Payment: settlement group and method, date, amount (≥ 0.01), plus type-specific references and any card fields marked mandatory. Contra: select open receivable documents; contra date is the latest document date unless CONTRA_DATE_SAME_AS_DOC_DATE_TXN is on.

Lifecycle and effects

FINAL validation (backend): exchange rate when currencies differ; serial, bin and batch quantities match the line quantity; transaction date and company present; date not in a locked fiscal period. (Blacklist and stock-balance checks do not apply — the movement is inbound.)

What FINAL does: generates running numbers; copies skip_einvoice from the customer; queues the primary processor (inventory, journal, AR, cashbook per company posting_final_json); queues the message-template (email) processor. Both Final buttons — in the document and on the listing — send only {posting_status: FINAL}, no stock, serial or date flag, so the server’s defaults apply; the transaction date stays as typed unless AUTO_UPDATE_TXN_DATE_ON_FINAL is stored (above).

Journal — SALES handler, amount signum −1, goods lines mapped to SALES_RETURN (a header group-discount line is the exception — see the warning below the table):

Stock: each PNS line writes an inventory transaction with quantity × +1 at the return’s branch and location; serial numbers and batches are re-activated at that location.

VOID sets the status and reason, queues the void primary processor (reverses stock, journal and AR) and removes the return from the e-Invoice queue. On a company enabled for e-invoicing the Void button refuses every sales return, submitted or not, with “Generic Document cannot be changed to VOID because e-invoice is enabled”. Cancelling the e-invoice first does not change that. The void that does work is a rejection request in My E-Invoice Admin approved with Void original document: it cancels at LHDN within the 72-hour window and then voids the return itself.

Worked example: a laptop comes back after three weeks

A corporate customer bought one ultraportable laptop at GS-KV-01 three weeks ago on a Sales Invoice for RM 3,800, on 30-day terms, and has not paid. The laptop comes back unused. Leave tax aside for the arithmetic; a tax line reverses the same way, to output tax. When the laptop was sold, the moving-average cost at the branch was RM 3,100. A cheaper batch has arrived since, and the average now stands at RM 2,950.

You create the return with Search By Invoice, take the one line, and Final it. A moment later the background jobs have run, and this is what changed:

How the credit meets the invoice. Until you join them, the customer’s account shows an invoice owing RM 3,800 and a return owed back RM 3,800. The total is right, but each document keeps its own balance, so the invoice goes on ageing as unpaid. Open the return’s Contra tab, tick the invoice and contra RM 3,800. Both balances fall to zero. A refund on the Payment tab is for a customer who has already paid: here it would hand back RM 3,800 against an invoice nobody settled.

Why the laptop comes back at today’s average, not at its old cost. A return line carries a selling price, not a cost. If the moving average absorbed it, every return would push the cost of everything else on the shelf towards the retail price. So BigLedger lets a sales return change the quantity but not the average. The RM 150 between RM 3,100 out and RM 2,950 back is not reversed by the return.

Where the numbers on a return come from

How you know a return went through

FINAL tells you the request was accepted, not that the background jobs succeeded. Spend 30 seconds on the saved return:

1. Open the TraceDocument tab, then Journal Txn. You should see Sales Return (or the line’s own GL code) and output tax on the debit side, and the customer on the credit side, for the return’s total. An empty grid means the journal job failed — go to the first row of Troubleshooting.
2. On the same tab, open Inv Txn. There is one row per returned line, with Qty Signum 1 — that is the stock coming in. If the grid is empty, the stock job has not run or failed, and Stock Balance will not have moved either.
3. In Stock Balance, the item at the return’s location has gone up by the quantity you took back.
4. On the listing, the return’s Balance is minus its total, or zero once a refund or contra covers it. After a contra, the original invoice’s Balance has fallen by the same amount.
5. If your company is enabled for e-invoicing, the return shows in My E-Invoice Admin after Final, never after a mere save.

Related applets

• Sales Invoice (Internal), POS General — the documents being returned against.
• Sales Credit Note (Internal) — financial-only correction without stock.
• Sales Refund Note (Internal), Receipt Voucher (Internal) — settle the credit balance later.
• Purchase Return (Internal) — intercompany mirror.
• My E-Invoice Portal, My E-Invoice Admin — submission against the original e-Invoice; cancellation windows.
• Stock Balance — where the returned quantity reappears.
• Customer, Chart of Account, Cashbook, Workflow Design — master data and workflow.

Troubleshooting

Related documentation

• Returns and Exchanges Workflow
• Inventory module, Financial Accounting module, E-Invoice module, POS module
• Sales Workflow applets