Adjustments lock after apply

A draft adjustment is fully editable. Once you apply it, it is not - and there is no undo.

That is worth knowing before you apply rather than after, because the check that takes ten seconds beforehand is the only chance you get.

What locks

Everything. Once an adjustment is applied you cannot:

• Change a quantity
• Change or add a reason
• Edit the notes or any other detail
• Add, edit or remove a line
• Delete the adjustment

There is no reverse or undo action. The adjustment is a permanent record of a change that has already been written to Shopify.

The one thing you can do is Archive it, which moves it off your open list into an Archived tab. That is tidying, not undoing - the stock change stands and the record is still there, and Unarchive brings it back.

Check these before applying

• The quantities, and their direction. A line reading -5 removes five units.
• The location. Adjusting the wrong location moves real stock in the wrong place.
• The reason. One applies to the whole adjustment, it is required, and it is what your reporting groups by later. Mixed reasons mean separate adjustments, which is a decision to make before applying rather than after.
• The notes and details - anything you want on the record. This is the part merchants most often want to fix afterwards, and the part they cannot.

Correcting a mistake afterwards

Create a second adjustment that offsets the first.

If you adjusted a variant down by 10 when you meant 1, create a new adjustment putting 9 back, with a reason recording what happened. Your stock ends up correct.

What that leaves is two entries in your history rather than one corrected entry - the original mistake and the correction, both visible. That is deliberate. An adjustment history that can be edited after the fact is not an audit trail, and yours needs to hold up to a stocktake reconciliation or an accountant.

A wrong cost is a different problem

Adjustments change quantity only. They never change cost.

So if the real problem is that stock came in at the wrong cost, no adjustment will fix it, in either direction. Correct it on the purchase order instead. Where the stock is already received, that means unreceiving those units before correcting the cost, since a corrected cost applies to the next receive rather than one already made.

What the record keeps

An applied adjustment keeps its lines, quantities, its reason, the location, who created it and when it was applied. The change is also written to Shopify's own inventory adjustment history under that reason, so it is traceable from either side. Export CSV is available at any status.