Stock does not only travel one way. Goods arrive damaged, a case turns out to be the wrong item, or a supplier ships something you never ordered - and it has to go back. A supplier return is a purchase order running in reverse: the same document, the same lines, the same supplier, except stock leaves your shelves instead of arriving, and the money comes back to you as a credit.
Create a return
The quickest way starts from the order the goods arrived on. Open the purchase order, then More actions and Create return. Stockroom fills the return with what that order actually received, at the costs it was received at, and remembers which order it came from. The button appears once an order has a recorded receipt - something has to have arrived before it can go back. Nothing to return against? Create return also sits beside Create purchase order on the Purchase orders page: pick the supplier, add products, enter quantities.
Returns take their own numbers - RET-1001, RET-1002 - and live in the same list with a Return badge. Filter orders gains Returns only and Purchase orders only. A document is a purchase or a return for its whole life: the type is set when you create it, and no document mixes the two.
Fill in the return
Reason - Damaged or defective, Ordered in error, or Other. This is the reason Shopify records against the stock movement later, so it is worth setting correctly. You can change it while the return is a draft.
Ship back by and Credit expected - the two dates. Credit expected drives the overdue flag on the credit, the way a payment due date does on a purchase order.
RMA # and Credit note # - the return number your supplier gave you, and their credit note when it arrives. A credit note number takes over as the return's number everywhere, exactly as a supplier invoice number does on a purchase order.
Unit costs - on a return these are the credit you expect, not a price you paid. They start from what the goods cost you, and you can edit them if the supplier is crediting something different. They never reach your product costs, your cost history, or your selling prices, so the update costs and prices prompts from receiving are not offered here.
Send it to the supplier
Click Mark as sent and the status moves to Sent. Email to supplier sends the return as a PDF with your message; Print return and Download PDF are under More actions.
Damage claims usually travel with photos. Drop them on the return's Attachments card - 5 files, up to 10 MB each - before or after you save it, then tick the attach box in the email dialog to send them to the supplier with the PDF. Full details are in Creating and Sending Purchase Orders.
Nothing moves in Shopify at this point, and nothing will until goods physically leave. A return never touches incoming stock in either direction, so units on an open return are never counted as being on the way - not in reorder suggestions, not in a product's incoming figure, not on your home page.
Record what shipped back
When the box goes back, open the return and click Record ship-back. The card is the receiving card in reverse: choose Ship back from location, then enter what actually left on each line. Max counts fills every line with what is still outstanding, Zero counts clears them, and scanning a barcode adds one to the matching line. Set the Ship-back date and a Shipment reference - the courier's tracking number is the useful one - then click Ship back now.
Moments later those units leave your Shopify available quantity at that location, and the product's inventory history in Shopify shows the change under your return's reason with the return's number attached - never an anonymous edit. The return moves to Partially returned, then Returned once everything has gone. Sending it all back at once with no reason to count line by line? Ship back all does it in one step, after a confirmation that spells out the units and the location.
If something changes
Undo on any ship-back in Ship-back history restores that stock to available in Shopify and withdraws the credit it recorded from your reports. The undone ship-back stays in the history, and you can record it again with the right numbers.
Cancel remaining on a line drops units that are not going back after all, so they stop counting toward the expected credit. Close under More actions does the same for the whole return.
More actions and Revert to draft undoes every ship-back and reopens the return as an editable draft in one step.
Getting your credit
The pill beside the return tracks the money the way it tracks payment on a purchase order, only in your favour: Credit pending, then Credit overdue once the credit expected date passes, and Credit received when you click Mark credit received. The Credit summary totals what you are owed, in the supplier's currency if you buy in one.
Where returns show up in reports
Vendor purchase history - Returns, Credit and Net columns beside Spend. A return never quietly shrinks what you spent with a supplier: you see both numbers and the net.
Receipts - a Direction column separates received lines from returned ones, and returned units and value are split out of the totals rather than blended in.
Inventory roll-forward - a Returned column between Adjusted and COGS, so the tie-out still reads left to right: opening + received + restocked + adjusted - returned - COGS = ending.
Inventory movements - every ship-back as its own row, filterable to the Return to supplier type. On a product's History, each one carries a Returned badge.
A return takes stock out at the cost it came in at and books no cost of goods sold, because nothing was sold - your COGS and margin figures are untouched. See The COGS report: FIFO and weighted average costing.
Good to know
A return is for stock that physically goes back to your supplier and comes back as money. If the goods are simply gone - broken, lost, stolen - that is a write-off: use a stock adjustment instead. See Stock adjustments: corrections with a paper trail.
There are no rejected counts on a return - nothing is arriving to reject, so record only what shipped back. Barcode and price labels do not print from one either; labels are for stock you are putting away.
If MyWorks Sync is connected, returns are deliberately kept out of what Stockroom sends it: everything in that feed becomes a supplier bill, and a return is money moving the other way. Vendor credit support is coming - until it lands, enter the supplier's credit note in QuickBooks yourself.
Returns do not appear on the POS, do not fire Shopify Flow triggers, and are not relayed to a supplier who is also on Stockroom Network.
Receiving works the same way in the other direction. See Receiving Inventory Against a Purchase Order.