How a return moves

Stockly → Returns is where goods coming back from a customer are handled. A return is a document: it records what the customer says is coming back, what actually arrived, what was decided about it and what money went back.

The section opens on a summary of what needs attention today. Stockly → Returns → Returns is the full list of every claim, whatever state it is in, and it is used to find a single case rather than to see how the day looks.

Returned goods never land straight on the sales shelf. They go into a holding area first, and only a decision taken by a person puts them back into stock.

The four steps

Step	What it records	Where the goods are
Announced	what the customer says is coming back	nowhere yet — nothing has arrived
Received	what the dock actually counted	in the returns holding area, not sellable
Dispositioned	the decision taken about each unit	back in stock, written off, or still held
Closed	the case is finished	wherever the decision put them

Three more states exist for cases that do not run straight through:

• Partially received — some of the claimed units arrived, the rest are still expected.
• Awaiting customer — the shop asked the customer a question and the clock is paused. See Asking the customer.
• Cancelled — the claim was called off. It is an exit, not a step: no goods pass through it.

Two statuses, not one

Every return carries two independent statuses, shown side by side in the Claim card on the return detail:

• State — where the goods are in the process (the steps in the table above).
• Refund — where the money is: Refund pending, Partially refunded, Refunded or No refund due.

They are deliberately separate. A claim can be fully dispositioned while the money is still owed, and a repair request needs no refund at all. Merging them would give one field answering two questions. Money is covered in Refunds.

The order’s own statuses stay with the shop

A claim moves the two statuses above and nothing else. The order’s delivery status stays Shipped and its payment status stays where it was, whether the claim was raised in the shop front, in the administration or at a counter.

That is deliberate. Returned against Returned partially is a statement about the whole delivery, while a claim covers only its own lines. Several cases complicate it: a second claim against the same order, units taken back and then refused on inspection, money given as goodwill with nothing sent back. Which of those completes a delivery is a bookkeeping decision, and shops answer it differently.

The shop makes that decision in a Flow, because every step of a claim fires an event the Flow Builder offers as a trigger:

1. Settings → Flow Builder → Add flow, and pick the trigger p2lab_stockly.returns.refunded — Stockly → Returns → Refunded in the trigger tree.
2. Add the action Set status, and in it Delivery status → Returned.
3. Save. Every refund from then on moves the delivery, wherever it was recorded.

Refunded is the usual moment, because that is the point at which the customer has the money back. A shop that would rather move the status when the goods come back uses p2lab_stockly.returns.received instead, and one that wants it the moment a claim is raised uses p2lab_stockly.returns.announced. Each event carries the order id, so the action knows which order to act on; the full list with the fields each one carries is in Events.

Where the goods physically stand

The order of the screens follows the physical path of the goods.

1. Receipt puts the goods into the warehouse’s returns holding area. Stock there is not counted as sellable: a customer cannot buy it.
2. The decision constitutes the inspection. Choosing Back to stock moves the units into the receiving buffer, and they become sellable at that moment, not later.
3. Put-away afterwards only decides which shelf they stand on. It does not change availability at all.

A unit is therefore unsellable exactly as long as nobody has inspected it, which is the purpose of the holding area. Once it has been inspected, waiting for a shelf no longer holds up the sale. → Booking in what arrived

The screens

Screen	What it is for
Overview	figures for a chosen period, and the flow explained on the page
Returns	every claim, filterable; the badge counts claims still waiting on the shop
Disposition queue	lines whose goods arrived and nobody has decided about them
Waiting for a shelf	goods already back in stock, still standing in the receiving buffer
Registers	reasons, return windows and exclusions the merchant sets up once

Who raises a claim

Four ways, all producing the same document:

• an operator, from the order — see Raising a return;
• the customer, in the shop front — see What the customer sees;
• a cashier, taking the goods back at the counter — see Taking a return at the till;
• automatically, when an order that was already despatched gets cancelled and the shop is configured to route those goods into the returns area.

The Raised by column on the returns list says which of the four it was, as Administration, Storefront, Counter or System.