The two types of refunds are economically different, although they are often confused in accounting. If the site has not sold the product and returns it to the seller — there was no sale, there is no need to cancel the proceeds. If the buyer has issued a refund through the marketplace, the site reflects this in the commission agent's report, and the implementation needs to be adjusted.
Because of this confusion, two typical failures occur. First, the accountant makes a refund from the commission agent and at the same time cancels the sale, which did not exist. Second, the buyer's return is carried out as a regular arrival at the warehouse and they forget to remove the sale. The balances are inflating, gross profit is jumping, and the owner does not understand why the goods have returned, but the margin has not recovered.
In the simplified taxation system, a decrease in income is linked to the date of the actual refund according to the document from the site's report — not to the day when the manager saw the buyer's complaint. This is especially critical at the junction of quarters: a December sale easily turns into a January refund, and an attempt to "fix" the previous period without a documented basis creates a tax risk.
Basically, the refund affects three zones simultaneously: accounting revenue, tax base and VAT registers. For refunds in sales accounting through the commission agent's report, a correction certificate for retail sales is applied; it enters the purchase book with the transaction type code 17.
A separate trap is the negative lines in the commission agent's report on remuneration or services. If a negative reward is associated with refunds or cancellations of orders, it is reflected as a decrease in sales revenue. If the negative amount arose for other reasons and exceeds the sales according to the report, this amount is considered as the seller's income.
Compensation for discounts from the site is included in the seller's income as of the date of receipt of the refund. If bonuses only reduce the cost of the site's services, separate transactions are not needed — the amount in the UPD is already indicated minus the points. When there are more bonuses than the cost of services, the surplus is reflected as other or non-operating income.
A typical chain of transactions looks like this: transfer of goods to the marketplace warehouse — Debit 45 (the goods remain in the seller's ownership, there is no sale); upon receipt of the commission agent's report on the sale — Debit 62 Credit 90.1 and Debit 90.2 Credit 45; upon return of unsold goods — Debit 41 Credit 45. The site's services — commission, logistics, storage, promotion, fines — are carried out separately: Debit 44 or 26 Credit 60 or 76.
A practical example: in August, the site sold goods for 480,000 rubles, in September, customers returned orders for 62,000 rubles. If the accountant focuses only on the amount of the payment, and not on the details of the commission agent's report, the refund is dissolved inside the deductions. The August revenue is not adjusted retroactively — the September refund is reflected in the September document.
The checkpoint for closing the month: one refund should change three indicators at the same time — income, product balance, and payments with the site. If only one of them has changed, the documentary chain is broken. Gaps are best seen in a combination of three reports: sales on the site, the movement of goods in the warehouse and the interpretation of deductions. The minimum package of documents for closing the month: a sales report or a commission agent's report, an UPD or an act for commission and services, documents for the transfer of goods to the site's warehouse, in case of discrepancies — additional transcripts and reconciliation reports.
