Cancel an order
How to cancel an order that was never paid — and when to refund instead.
Cancel is for an order that has no payment recorded against it, such as a phone order the customer rang back to call off, a duplicate that was rung up twice, or something added to the system by mistake.
If money has already changed hands, cancelling is not the right tool and you need a refund instead, because the customer has to be given their money back rather than simply having the order removed. Dinerly works this out for you and shows you only the button that applies: a paid order shows Refund, and an unpaid one shows Cancel order.
Cancel it
- Open Orders and click the order.
- Click Cancel order in the header.
- Type a Reason. This stays on the order permanently, so write something that will still make sense to somebody reading it months from now.
- Confirm.
What cancelling does
The order is taken out of your revenue reports and out of the accounting export, so that your figures only ever show what you genuinely sold. It is not deleted, though: it stays visible in the orders list, clearly marked as cancelled and with your reason attached, so there is still a record of what happened.
One thing cancelling cannot do is stop the food being cooked. If the kitchen has already been given the ticket, you need to go and tell them, because cancelling the order in Dinerly does not reach the pass.
Write reasons you will understand later. When you look back at an order in a few months, the reason is the only thing that will remind you why it was cancelled, so something like “Customer cancelled — no answer on the phone” gives you the full story. A one-word reason such as “Mistake” does not tell you what the mistake actually was, and by then nobody will remember.
Last updated 20 September 2026