Practical guide / Shopping, Deliveries & Returns Workbook 1.0
From the order to the money actually returned.
Connect purchases to partial deliveries, return records and actual refund transactions. Review what arrived, what still needs returning and what you really spent.
Your first useful result: Record the purchase Follow the first task
Record the purchase
Add the merchant, one order and its item lines. Enter the actual line discount and order postage separately.
The linked records and input checks use the same stable IDs and your chosen dates.
Review: Review the labelled results and correct source warnings before acting.
Follow partial deliveries
Link each receipt of goods to its Line ID. Returns keeps quantity, requested money and actual sending date separate.
The linked records and input checks use the same stable IDs and your chosen dates.
Review: Review the labelled results and correct source warnings before acting.
Reconcile actual refunds
Link received refund transactions to the Return ID. Order Review shows what was ordered, refunded and actually retained.
The linked records and input checks use the same stable IDs and your chosen dates.
Review: Review the labelled results and correct source warnings before acting.
Check the assumptions.
- Save a working copy. Manual entry, with no automatic sync or external connections.
- Supplied tables have fixed capacities. Extend formulas, tables and validation together before using extra rows.
- Use one currency. Blank means unknown; enter 0 when the amount is known to be zero.
- Resolve the highlighted input rows before relying on the summary.
- Uses exact-mode XMATCH. Requires Excel 2021, Excel 2024 or Microsoft 365; older Excel editions are not supported. Native Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers have not been verified.
- Return dates and eligibility are entered from the merchant policy. This workbook does not decide consumer rights.
- Requested refunds do not reduce actual spending. Record a refund only when the money has arrived.
- Keep historical unit prices, line discounts and order postage. One line can have several partial deliveries and returns.
- Cancelled is for an unsent request with no actual refund. Keep the record; its quantity and requested money leave the active totals. One bank transaction links to one return record; combined transaction allocation across different returns is not supplied. Order cancellation covers the whole order; partial item cancellation is outside this edition. Closed without sending records a merchant-confirmed resolution without inventing a physical handover.
Keep a copy you can return to.
Keep the supplied clean and example files unchanged. Save your own working file with a useful name, such as shopping-returns-2027-home.xlsx, and keep a dated backup before a large edit. A purchased ZIP is the blank source, not a backup of your entries.
If an input or formula is replaced
Undo the edit while it is still available, or return to a known good backup. If you need a fresh clean file, transfer only your records into its marked input cells and follow the setup guide again. Do not paste whole sheets over the supplied formulas, validations or reference lists. Check IDs, units, dates and linked results against the example before relying on the copy.
When the supplied rows are full
100 merchants · 200 orders · 1,000 order lines · 600 deliveries · 400 returns · 400 refunds. Calculation ranges and validations have fixed capacities. A new row below a table does not prove that every linked result includes it.
For a separate period, project or volume, preserve the old workbook and start a named clean copy. If records must carry forward, record exactly which inputs you transfer, preserve their references and compare the opening and closing figures. Avoid copying historical activity as both an opening amount and a new movement. There is no automatic migration between files.
Inspect the workbook before you choose.
View its real sheets and a fictional calculation example.
Explore Shopping, Deliveries & Returns WorkbookWritten for version 1.0. Examples describe the supplied workflow; they are not customer results.