Summary Objects and Change Objects

Typically, users interact with summary records instead of the underlying records. For example, a service agent looking up information for a customer searches for the order summary, not the original order.

Summary objects help maintain a record of data changes. Consider a customer who cancels a product from an order. Instead of modifying the original order record, Order Management creates an order record that stores the changes, referred to as a change order. The order summary record maintains a relationship with the original order and any change orders that apply to it. Initially, the data in the order summary matches the values in the original order. For each change that has a financial impact, the system creates a change order and updates the order summary. The values in the summary are equal to the sums of the corresponding values in the original order and all subsequent change orders.

Only substantive modifications that affect charges and payments, such as canceling a product from an order, create change order records. Expected updates related to an object’s workflow, such as a change to an order’s status, don’t have change records. To maintain records of those updates, store the information separately.

To interact with an order, access the order summary. To examine the order history, retrieve the original order and any subsequent change orders. Other records related to an order, such as fulfillment orders, order payment summaries, and order product summaries, are associated with the order summary. Data from these records shows on the Order Summary page, and you can access the corresponding records from quick links and related lists.

Similarly, order product summaries provide a dynamic view of the products in an order that originate as order product records. However, order product changes include information not stored in order product records, such as the type of change and the reason. Order Management represents a product change with an order product summary change object in addition to the order product object.

Order product summaries include multiple quantity fields that track detailed information about the order lifecycle, such as allocated quantity and returned quantity. You don’t update these quantities directly. Instead, actions that affect quantities automatically recalculate them.

Unlike other summary objects, an order payment summary doesn’t represent an original record and changes to it. Instead, it represents a set of payment records that use the same payment method and are associated with an order summary. An order payment summary makes it easy to understand and work with an order’s balances across multiple payments, including authorization, capture, and refund amounts.