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Cancelling or Closing a Transaction

When a deal falls through — or closes successfully — you move the transaction into a terminal status so it stops appearing as active work and its automation winds down cleanly.

How to cancel a transaction​

Cancelling is a status change. Move the transaction into any status whose type is Cancelled (the seeded Cancelled status, or a custom one you created with the Cancelled type). You can change the status:

  1. From the transaction header — click the status chip and pick a Cancelled status
  2. From the Pipeline — drag the card into a Cancelled column
  3. From the Transactions list — use the inline status control
  4. From the transaction's Edit form — change the Status field and save

All four do the same thing. Closing a completed deal works the same way, using a Closed-type status. See Transaction Statuses for how status types work and how to add your own.

Closing out a file​

When a deal has closed and you want to close out the file — mark it as closed — change its status to a Closed-type status:

  1. Open the transaction
  2. Click the status chip next to the property address at the top of the page (it shows the current status, such as Under Contract, with a small arrow; tooltip Click to change status)
  3. Pick Closed (or your own status whose type is Closed)
  4. A confirmation appears under the header: "Ends the deal: cancels unsent reminders and scheduled emails, skips open tasks, marks key dates not applicable." Click Mark Closed to confirm, or the Keep button (for example Keep Under Contract) to back out

You'll see Status updated to Closed. What a status does depends on its type, not its name — a custom status like "Funded" or "Recorded" closes the deal only if its type is Closed. Check or change types in Settings > Statuses (the Transaction Statuses page).

Closing a deal does not hide it from your Transactions list or turn off the client portal — the deal stays visible as a closed deal, and its portal link keeps working. To clear it out of your working list as well, archive it afterwards (see Archiving a Transaction).

Close vs. archive​

  • Close answers what happened: the deal closed. Use it on closing day.
  • Archive answers do I still need to see it: it hides the deal from the active list and revokes portal links. Use it later, once the file is reconciled. An archived deal comes back with Restore — see Restoring or Deleting an Archived Transaction.

What happens when you cancel or close​

Moving a transaction from an open status into a Closed or Cancelled status is a terminal transition. DocJacket automatically winds down the deal's pending work — only for that transaction:

  • Incomplete key dates are marked Not Applicable (completed and waived dates are left as-is)
  • Open tasks are marked Skipped, noted "Transaction cancelled" or "Transaction closed" to match the status you chose
  • Pending scheduled messages are cancelled
  • Unsent reminders are deleted
  • Pending scheduled emails are deleted (already-sent emails are kept, so your send history stays intact)
  • Calendar events for the transaction are removed

Closed vs. Cancelled: both wind down pending work the same way. The difference is that a Closed status also fires your "closed" automation and pushes the closed stage to connected CRMs (like Follow Up Boss). A Cancelled status does not trigger closed-stage automation.

Terminal cleanup only touches this transaction

Every one of these changes is scoped to the single transaction you're cancelling. Nothing cascades to any other deal.

Cancelling a purchase but keeping the listing​

A listing and a purchase are independent transaction records — different deals, each with its own status, tasks, and dates. There is no automatic link between them, so cancelling a purchase has no effect on a listing.

If you have a separate listing and a separate purchase:

  1. Open the purchase transaction and move it to a Cancelled status
  2. Your listing stays exactly as it was — still open and in your queue

To find the listing afterward, open Transactions and filter the type to Listing (see Listings).

If you turned a listing into a sale or purchase

Converting a listing to a purchase doesn't create a second record — it changes the same record's type. In that case there is no separate listing to keep, and cancelling the transaction cancels that single record. If it's going back on the market, change its status back to an active listing status rather than cancelling (see the next section). If you already cancelled it, change the status from Cancelled back to an active status — DocJacket offers the same Buyer fell through? reset.

A deal fell through — putting a listing back on the market​

Often the "purchase" and the "listing" are the same record: you took a listing, it went under contract, and now the buyer has backed out. You want it to go back to being an active listing — still in your pipeline, without the buyer's information cluttering it up.

The best move is to change the status straight back to an active listing status rather than cancelling. Cancelling is a terminal status, so it winds the deal down — open tasks become Skipped, key dates become Not Applicable, and reminders and scheduled emails are deleted — and that work stays wound down when you reopen the deal, so you'd re-apply your listing Playbook afterward.

To put the listing back on the market and let DocJacket clear the buyer out for you:

  1. Open the listing and click the status chip (or drag its card in the Pipeline)
  2. Change the status from Under Contract back to an open listing status — Active, MLS Active, or whichever your office uses
  3. DocJacket recognises that a listing is leaving its under-contract status and asks "Buyer fell through?". The dialog lists exactly what it is about to do — how many buyer-side contacts it will remove, which contract fields it will clear, how many contract key dates and tasks it will retire, and how many pending emails and reminders it will cancel — then offers two buttons:
    • Put back on market — removes the buyer, the buyer's agent and any other buyer-side contacts from this deal, along with the buyer's lender — the loan officer, the processor and the lender details on the deal (their contact records are kept) — clears the contract fields, retires the key dates and closing-checklist tasks that came with the contract (marked not applicable and skipped, never deleted), cancels the contract's pending emails and unsent reminders, marks the accepted offer withdrawn, and moves the deal to the status you picked. Kept: every document, your listing-side contacts, and the listing's own key dates and tasks.
    • Just change the status — the plain status change: the deal moves to the status you picked and nothing else is touched.
  4. Cancel keeps the deal exactly as it was.

What the reset clears and what it keeps​

Cleared — everything that came from the buyer's contract:

  • The buyer and second buyer, the buyer's agent, and the selling agent and selling firm
  • Purchase price, earnest money, down payment, appraisal gap, option fee, balance to close, and the financing and loan details (including the cash-deal setting)
  • Seller concessions and credits: seller closing-cost contribution (amount and percent), seller credit to the buyer, and credits
  • The buyer's home warranty: the warranty company and contact, whether it's included, the buyer's share and the home-warranty contingency
  • Buyer-side commission dollars: the buyer's agent commission amount, the cooperating agent commission, and the buy-side commission split
  • The contract's dates, periods and deadlines: contract and under-contract dates, offer dates, inspection, option, due-diligence, title, attorney-review and final walkthrough dates, and the contingency choices, periods and statuses
  • The buyer's lender details

Kept — everything that belongs to the listing: the list price, the listing commission rate, the seller's agent commission, the listing agent, the buyer's agent commission rate your listing offers, any home warranty the seller agreed to provide in the listing agreement, and the seller's own title company.

If the list price is empty — common when only the sale price was filled in while the deal was under contract — the dialog says List price is empty. Set it after the reset. DocJacket never copies the old sale price into the list price, so fill it in yourself once the listing is back on the market.

Title and escrow​

The dialog has a box Also remove title & escrow, ticked by default. Who chooses title varies by state — in Arizona, for example, title and escrow come with the buyer's offer.

  • Ticked — the title and escrow contacts (title company, escrow officer, title rep and the like) come off the deal along with the buyer, and the title company, escrow company, escrow agent, escrow holder, escrow number and wire instructions are cleared. The dialog counts the title contacts it will remove.
  • Unticked — title and escrow stay on the listing exactly as they are. Use this when the seller chose title.

The seller's own title company (used in split-closing states such as Tennessee) is never removed.

Re-applying a Playbook after the reset​

Once the listing is back on the market, applying a Playbook (for example when the next offer comes in) creates fresh key dates for the new contract. Dates the old contract left behind — closing, loan approval and other dates marked not applicable or waived, and contract dates that were completed before the reset, such as the old Contract Date — are not reused. The apply preview no longer lists them under key dates already on this deal, and the new dates start as pending, dated by the Playbook. The listing's own completed dates, such as the Listing Date, are kept as they are. This only applies to dates set before the listing went back on the market. On a deal that was never put back on the market, re-applying a Playbook keeps waived and not-applicable dates as they are.

If your office has an automation that runs when a deal enters the status you picked (a "back to Active" email, say), the dialog tells you so — it will run either way, the same as any other status change.

The dialog only appears on listing-side deals moving out of an under-contract status. A buyer-side deal, or a listing moving between two active statuses, gets the ordinary status change with no prompt.

If you already marked it Cancelled​

If you cancelled the deal when the buyer walked away, you can still reset it: change the status from Cancelled back to an active listing status. If the deal was under contract before you cancelled it, DocJacket asks "Buyer fell through?" and Put back on market works the same way. Tasks and key dates the cancellation already skipped or marked not applicable stay that way — re-apply your listing Playbook for the new listing period, and it creates fresh dates rather than reusing the old contract's. A listing you cancelled while it was still on the market gets the ordinary status change.

Dual-side deals​

If you represented both the buyer and the seller, Put back on market turns the deal into a seller-side listing. The Buying Agent comes off the deal and the Listing Agent stays — even when you were both.

Closed deals​

A deal marked Closed isn't reset this way: a sold home coming back on the market is a new deal. If a deal was marked Closed by mistake, change its status back first.

Cancel vs. change status

Cancel when the deal is truly dead and you want its pending work to stop. If the property is going back on the market, change the status to an active listing status instead — and choose Put back on market if you want the buyer's data gone, or Just change the status if you'd rather tidy it up yourself. Already cancelled it? Changing the status back to active offers the same reset.

Reopening a transaction​

If you cancelled a deal by mistake, move it back into an open status to reactivate it. Because the terminal transition marked pending items as Skipped or Not Applicable, review the transaction's tasks and key dates afterward and restore anything that should be active again.