Why you can’t reverse a purchase registration in WHS in AX 2012 R3

The new Advanced Warehousing processes in Dynamics AX 2012 R3 use the warehouse mobile client purchase order receipt process to ‘register’ the product receipt.

I’ve created (and confirmed) a purchase order:

Then I’ve used the warehouse mobile forms to process the purchase order receipt:

And now, when we look at the purchase order we can see that we have Registered that receipt:

OOPS – we’ve received the wrong purchase order. No worries, based on our previous experience of Dynamics AX we know that we can go to the Purchase order line > Update line> Registrationform and reverse the Registration:

Click ‘Auto-create’:

And Post all:

So what happened? Warehouse work is what happened. As well as registering the purchase order receipt we’ve created warehouse work (and its concomitant inventory transactions, one of which is reserving the registered inventory so we can put it away in the warehouse):

So now what we’ve got to do is not just reverse the registration, but we have to cancel the warehouse work, and then reverse the registration. That process has been covered by Ivan Kashperuk in this blog post: Walkthrough: Cancelling put-away work in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3. There Ivan mentions this important warehouse management parameter, ‘Unregister receipt when cancelling work’:

However, of course we could of course gone one step further and completed the warehouse work, in which case we would see:

In this second case we simply don’t have the option of reversing the registration because we’ve got financially updated warehouse work transactions – the last one is a receipt into our put-away location. Even if we manually move the on hand stock back into our receiving location, reversing the registration is no longer an option because our inventory position would be wrong and inconsistent.

The cancellation process has to be:
1) post the product receipt on the registration;
2) manually move the on-hand back to the receiving location
3) then cancel the product receipt.

The Total Quality mantra of “do it right the first time” never seemed more appropriate.