About Canceling Checks and Electronic Payments

You need to cancel a check or electronic payment if it has been matched but for some reason the vendor isn't going to receive it. For example, a check may have been lost in the mail. The cancel process will revert all of the paid documents to their previous state so that they can be paid again in the future.

From the payment record, you can choose whether to cancel:

• one or more selected account lines(Cancel Selected)
• all active (uncanceled) account lines on a payment proposal (Cancel All).

These buttons are only visible when there are account lines ready to be canceled.

Note:

Since you can't reverse the cancellation of a payment, you should have the check you want to cancel in your possession, or proof that it has been destroyed, before you record it as canceled. You may also want to review the invoices paid by that payment before you cancel it, to make sure that you are canceling the correct payment.

If you aren't in possession of the check, or if the payment was electronic, call your bank to initiate a stop payment. Wait until you receive confirmation of the stop payment before you cancel it.

Custom Settings

The following fields in the Accounting Settings custom setting are relevant to this process. Make sure you review these fields and enter appropriate values:

• Chatter Notification
• Email Notification
• Task Notification
• Maximum Queue Size

See Managing Custom Settings for more information.

Restrictions

You can't cancel a payment if any one of the following is true:

• Its payment history has been cleared.
• Your org in multi-company mode State in which the current user has more than one current company selected. Data entry is disabled until the user returns to single-company mode. Enable multi-company mode when you want to generate reports that contain data from more than one company..
• The payment type is "Collection".
• It is already being canceled or has been canceled previously.
• The payment belongs to a bank reconciliation.
• The match has been manually undone.
• The document to be canceled is only part of a payment for an account. A payment in this context is a single check or electronic payment. So, for example, if the check paid nine invoices you cannot cancel just three of them. You must cancel the whole check or electronic payment.

Transactions that belong to payments that are canceled, or are being canceled, are prevented from being included in a bank reconciliation.

The Cancel Process

• The payment proposal's status is initially set to "Canceling".
• The matching status of all transaction line items must be set to "Matched".
• The original cash match is undone.
• Any discount, write-off or currency write-off journals associated with the original payment are canceled and matched.
• A cash entry of type "Payment Refund" is created and posted. This has an equal and opposite amount to the payment cash entry. A period corresponding to the cancel date must exist and be open. (If the original cash entry was of type "Payment Refund" the canceling cash entry is of type "Payment".)
• The original payment and the payment refund are matched, and any cash matching journals are also matched.
• When the process completes, the payment proposal's values are updated and its status is set to "Part Canceled" (or "Canceled" if it now consists of only canceled lines).
• The canceled summary and detail lines are removed from the payment media tables and the payment media totals are updated.
• If the original payment was in the form of a check, it is marked as void.
• The analysis transaction line items for the cash entries related to the original payment transaction and the payment refund have their bank reconciliation status set to "Canceled" so that they can't be used on a bank reconciliation.

All of the documents that were originally paid are now available to pay again.

Note:

You can view the cancel payment criteria, including the cancel reason, on a canceled payment by moving your mouse over the information icon on the Payments page. This is useful if you just want to quickly check something like the cancel reason or date. Your System Administrator will need to enable the Enable Hover Details checkbox (from Setup, Customize | User Interface) for this popup information to be displayed.