Returns and exchanges

Once the money has been taken there are two ways to put something right: a return, or an exchange. Neither of them is deleting the bill.

Why not delete

Deleting looks like the easy option and does the most damage:

• The day's sales figure changes and the cash in the drawer does not — so the day close is out.
• A sale that really happened vanishes from the VAT summary.
• There is no record that anybody returned anything.

A return keeps all three straight. It is the same reason you write a reversing entry in a ledger rather than scribbling out the line.

Returns

Open the bill from the sales list and return it. Pick the lines coming back — a partial return is fine, it does not have to be the whole bill.

What happens by itself:

• The stock comes back. If the goods are not fit to sell again, write them off after taking the return.
• The price comes from the original bill, not from today's. The customer gets back what they paid, even if the price has gone up since.
• The VAT reverses too, at that line's own rate.

Record how you are refunding it. If the goods were bought on credit, take it off their khata rather than handing over cash.

Exchanges

A customer bringing something back and taking something else is an exchange — one operation, not two.

If the new item costs more, take the difference; if less, refund it or put it on their khata. Do not ring up two separate bills to balance it out, because that counts the day's sales twice and makes the day look better than it was.

Worth a monthly look

Read the returns list once a month. A lot of returns usually means one of three things: a supplier's goods are arriving bad, somebody on the counter is handing over the wrong item, or a product is labelled wrongly on the shelf.

All three are fixable — but only if the returns were actually recorded.