# Introduction - Sales Returns

A sales return brings goods back from a customer and puts the units back on your shelf.

**Video coming soon:** A return from approval to received goods to the credit that follows them.

It is the only sales document that moves stock in the opposite direction, and it settles two things at once: the units come back into your count and the customer gets their value back.

![The Sales Returns screen, subtitled Track customer returns, receipts and refunds, and its Sales Return action. Columns read Return Date, Return Number, Sales Order Number, Customer, Status, Received, Refund and Total Amount. Ten returns numbered RET-00001 upward sit against sales orders and UK customers including Severn Valley Plant Hire, Thameside Fabrication and Poole Bay Marine Works, all with status Approved, and every row reading Not Received and Not Refunded.](https://www.sorviai.com/help/inventory/sales-returns/returns-list.png)

*Status, Received and Refund are three separate columns, because a return finishes in three separate moments.*

## Three columns, three questions

This is the shape of the whole module, and it is why the list has the columns it does.

- **Status** (is it agreed): Whether the return has been approved. A return nobody has agreed to is a pallet arriving unannounced.
- **Received** (have the goods landed): Whether the units are physically back. This is the column that moves stock.
- **Refund** (has the customer been credited): Whether the money half is settled. It follows the receive rather than leading it.

1. **Raise**: What is coming back
2. **Receive**: Stock returns to the shelf
3. **Credit**: Customer gets their money

## What it goes against

A return is raised against the sales order, not the invoice. That is deliberate: the order is what named the goods and the quantities, and the whole question a return asks is which of those are coming back.

![A sales return record showing its number and status, the sales order it was raised against, the customer, the lines and quantities coming back, and an activity panel at the right.](https://www.sorviai.com/help/inventory/sales-returns/return-detail.png)

*The return names its sales order, which is what the received quantities are checked against.*

> **Warning:**
>
> **Receiving is what moves stock, and it is the step to be careful about**
>
> Receiving a return puts the units straight back into available, where the next order can take them. If the goods came back damaged, receive them and then adjust them out with a reason, rather than pretending they never arrived.

> **Tip:**
>
> **Read the two columns separately at month end**
>
> Received but not refunded means you are holding stock a customer still believes they own. Refunded but not received means the opposite, and it is the more expensive of the two.