Cancelling, voiding, returning, or deleting a purchase affects its entitlements in different ways. This article explains what each action does to a customer's entitlements, and what happens when an entitlement reaches its expiry date.
Cancelling Part of an Order Line
When you cancel some units on an order line, Rhythm reduces the entitlements from that line in proportion to the units you cancelled. If that reduction brings an entitlement to zero, Rhythm deletes the entitlement record instead of keeping a zero-quantity entitlement.
Voiding an Order
When you void an order, Rhythm removes every entitlement that order granted. The void removes the full grant from the order, not only the portion related to the reason for the void.
Voiding affects more than cancelling part of a line because it undoes the entire order's entitlement grant.
Returning a Purchase Does Not Take Back Entitlements
Warning
Processing a return does not reduce or remove the entitlements granted by the returned product. Unlike a cancellation, a return leaves those entitlements exactly as they were.
If you need to take back rights from a returned purchase, staff must correct the entitlement directly. You can edit the entitlement quantity or delete the entitlement by hand from the customer's record or the order record.
Deleting a Contact, an Organization, or an Order
When you delete the contact or organization that owns an entitlement, Rhythm deletes that customer's entitlements with the record. See Change a Contact's Status or Delete a Contact and Change an Organization's Status or Type, or Delete It for how to delete those records.
Deleting an order removes the entitlements that order granted, the same as voiding the order.
Deleting an Entitlement Type
Deleting an entitlement type your Rhythm account no longer uses does not change entitlements already granted under that type. Those entitlements stay as they are and keep the deleted type's identifier, and Rhythm does not reassign or remove them.
Because the type record is gone, staff pages that would normally show the type name can only show the raw identifier for those entitlements. There is no type name left for Rhythm to look up. See Entitlements Explained for the same behavior when a type is switched off instead of deleted.
Expired Entitlements Stay on the Record
An entitlement is not automatically cleared, hidden, or moved off the customer's record when its expiry date passes. It stays listed exactly as it did before expiring, and the staff page does not mark it as expired.
An expired entitlement is removed only in the same ways as any other entitlement: staff delete it, a cancellation reduces it, or the related customer or order is deleted.
Tip
If someone who bought content such as a webinar in the past needs portal access restored on their current profile, staff have used a $0.00 purchase on that profile as a workaround, rather than editing the original entitlement by hand. Treat this as observed practice, not a documented feature.