How Cancellations Are Treated

Cancelled orders are handled differently from refunded orders in Profitario. This article explains what cancellation means, how cancelled orders appear in your reports, and how to configure their treatment.

What Is a Cancellation?#

In Shopify, an order is cancelled when it is stopped before being fulfilled -- for example, the customer changes their mind, you run out of stock, or the payment cannot be captured. Cancelled orders have their financial status set to voided in Shopify.

This is different from a refund, which is issued after an order has been paid (and possibly fulfilled). If the customer returns a delivered item, that is a refund -- see Refunds vs Returns.

Are Cancelled Orders Counted?#

By default, cancelled orders are excluded from your dashboard and reports. They do not contribute revenue, costs, shipping, fees, or any other financial metric. They also do not count toward your order count or conversion rate.

You can change this in the Status Group Settings if you want cancelled orders to appear. See Status group settings.

Why the Default Is to Exclude#

A cancelled order never generated revenue and never consumed real inventory. Including it would double-count costs in most accounting models. The default excludes them so your profit and cost metrics reflect only orders that actually happened.

Turning On Cancelled Order Tracking#

If you want cancelled orders visible:

1. Open Settings → Calculation Settings.
2. Scroll to Status Groups.
3. Enable the Voided group.
4. Pick which components (revenue, COGS, shipping, fees) you want included.

You can include some components and exclude others. For example, you can include revenue and COGS but leave shipping and transaction fees out, if you were never charged those on cancelled orders.

Cancellation Date Attribution#

Once cancelled orders are included, you can choose which date they appear on:

• Cancellation date (default) -- The order appears on the day it was cancelled. This matches when the cancellation actually happened.
• Original order date -- The order appears on the date it was originally placed, retroactively adjusting that day's numbers.

Choose based on whether you want your daily reports to reflect activity as it happened (cancellation date) or the true outcome of orders placed on each day (original order date).

Cancellation With Auto-Refund#

Some cancellations also trigger an automatic refund (for example, if the customer had already paid). In that case, Profitario records both:

• The cancelled order through the rules described above (controlled by status group settings).
• The refund itself through the refund rules (controlled by refund settings).

If you exclude cancelled orders but your cancellation included a refund, the refund may still appear in your reports depending on your refund settings. This is intentional: the refund is real cash that left your account.

What Happens to Inventory#

Cancellations made before fulfillment do not consume inventory -- the product was never shipped. When such a cancellation includes a refund, each line item is usually marked as Cancel in Shopify. If you have Recover cost on restock enabled (see Refund Settings Guide), that means the item's cost is reversed from COGS.

Impact on Reports#

• Dashboard -- With the default settings, cancelled orders are invisible. Revenue, order count, and conversion rate exclude them. If you enable the Voided group, they appear like any other order but on the date you chose.
• Orders List -- Cancelled orders are always visible here with a cancelled indicator, regardless of settings. Their revenue, costs, profit, and margin show as 0, and the totals row leaves them out, since a cancelled order contributes nothing financially.
• Income Statement -- Only shows cancelled orders if the Voided group is enabled.
• Products Report -- Only counts cancelled orders if the Voided group is enabled with the revenue/cogs components on.

Common questions