Allow exchange for Sales Return (allow new items to be added in return transaction)

Olawale1 commented 7 years ago

Processing refunds is an important part of retail. There are 2 major scenarios when processing a refund depending on policies in the country or within the organization:

When an item is returned, give the customer their money back
When an item is returned, it can only be swapped for another item of similar value

For the second scenario where the item gets swapped (and this is the most common practice), the usual process in other POS applications will be to enter the new item(s) being selected by the customer into the same table as the item(s) being returned. This way, the invoice immediately shows what the balance payment should be (assuming the customer picks a more expensive item) and then the payment is processed just like a regular POS transaction

This approach is not only very simple for the Sales Staff to understand and follow, it is also very effective during audits and reconciliation because it mirrors the real life situation. However, when you try this approach in ERPNext, it returns an error saying that the serial number for the new item doesn't belong to the original Sales Invoice! Currently there is no decent way to handle this scenario in ERPNext and it's a big issue in live retail environment

I would suggest the following:

An additional option 'Include New Items' should appear whenever 'Is Return' is checked in the Sales Invoice form. When the 'Include New Items' option is checked, the restriction to add only items (and Serial Numbers) from the original invoice should be removed. In other words, the validation for items in the original invoice should only be for items with negative (-ve) quantity whenever the 'Include New Items' option is checked
There should however be a validation to ensure that at least one item from the original invoice is included in the return invoice otherwise it's not a return invoice!

P.s. Using the 'Include New Items' option makes it easy to filter for return invoices which include new items and those that don't

Thanks