Uninstalling Restock Ops: what stays in Shopify, what to export

Stocky's shutdown taught a lot of stores the same lesson in the same month: the day an inventory app goes away, you find out what it was holding for you. Some of it turned out to be in Shopify all along. Some of it was gone. The difference was rarely clear beforehand, and it was not clear which exports to take until it was too late to take them.

This post is the version of that answer for Restock Ops, written while you are still installed. It separates the data that lives in Shopify and is untouched by uninstalling from the data the app holds for you and deletes on a timer, lists the exports that cover the second group, and goes through the loose ends, open purchase orders and incoming projections in particular, that are better tied off before you leave than after.

The dividing line: Shopify is the ledger

Restock Ops is built on a single rule: Shopify stays the system of record for quantities and costs. The app never keeps its own stock figure. When you receive a delivery, it asks Shopify to adjust the available quantity at the destination location; when you post a stocktake, it asks Shopify to set the counted quantities; when a receipt updates a cost, it writes Shopify's cost per item. Each of those is a normal inventory write, logged in Shopify's own history with a reason and a reference back to the document that caused it.

The consequence for uninstalling is simple. Everything the app wrote into Shopify is Shopify's data now, and removing the app changes none of it. What you lose is the paperwork around those writes: the documents, the supplier records and the app's own log.

What stays, what goes

The 48 hours, and what happens in them

Uninstalling does two things at two different times. The moment you click uninstall, Shopify revokes the app's access and notifies it; Restock Ops deletes its access token for your store immediately, so the app can no longer read or write anything in your admin from that point. Your documents are still in its database, but there is nothing the app can do with them and no way for you to open them, because the admin page that showed them no longer exists for your store.

Forty-eight hours later Shopify sends the app a mandatory deletion request, the one every app that stores shop data must honour, and Restock Ops deletes everything it holds for the store in one transaction: write log, cost history, reorder rules, stocktakes, purchase orders with their lines and receipts, suppliers with their catalogs, settings and sessions. The delay is Shopify's, not ours, and it is there for the case where an uninstall was a mistake. Reinstall within the window and the data is where you left it. Reinstall after it and you start empty.

That window is not a grace period for exporting, because you cannot reach the app once it is uninstalled. Export first, then uninstall. If you have already uninstalled and realise you need a document, reinstalling within 48 hours is the only route back.

The exports to take

Cost history has no export of its own. If you need past costs, the PO export carries the unit cost on every line you ever ordered, which is the same information in a different shape. The write log also has no export; its purpose is served by Shopify's inventory history, which is covered next.

• All purchase orders, as one CSV. On the Purchase orders list, export with no status filter. The file has one row per PO line with the PO number, status, supplier, destination, currency, ordered and expected dates, your reference, invoice number, status and due date, then the product, variant, SKU, barcode, supplier SKU, quantities ordered and received, unit cost, tax percentage and line total. That is the document trail your accountant will ask for, and it is also every supplier's catalog in disguise: filter to a supplier, sort by date, and the latest row per SKU is the supplier SKU and cost you last paid.
• Filtered exports for anything open. Export once more with the Open filter, so you have a short list of drafts, ordered and partially received POs to chase or close before leaving, and once with Unpaid invoices, which is the list the person paying them needs.
• Individual POs you still owe a supplier. Each PO page exports on its own; take the ordered ones you have not yet received, since you will be receiving them without the app.
• A stocktake record if one is in progress. Finish or discard it. A stocktake that was counted but never posted has written nothing to Shopify, and the counts die with it.
• Barcode labels you still need. Labels print from the app's label page; print a batch for anything on an incoming PO before you lose the page. The label content is Shopify's barcode, so any label tool can take over afterwards.

Shopify's history keeps the audit trail

Every adjustment Restock Ops makes carries a reason and a reference document URI that points at the receipt or stocktake behind it. Shopify shows both in the inventory history for the variant, under View adjustment history, alongside the adjustments made by orders, transfers and staff. That history is Shopify's and stays after uninstall.

What changes is that the reference link stops resolving, because the document it pointed at was deleted. The quantity, the date, the reason and the fact that an app made the change all remain, which is enough to reconcile a count. If you ever used the app's undo, those undos are recorded in Shopify as adjustments in the opposite direction, so the history reads correctly end to end. This is the payoff of the ledger rule: undoing a wrong adjustment was done through Shopify, so nothing about it depends on the app still existing.

Loose ends to tie off first

Two things the app does on your behalf do not undo themselves when it leaves.

The first is incoming projection. If you switched it on in Settings, every PO you marked as ordered added its units to Shopify's incoming quantity at the destination, and the app removes those units when the PO is received, closed or cancelled. Uninstall with ordered POs open and the incoming figures stay where they are, with nothing left to clear them. Shopify will show stock as on its way that no longer has a document behind it, which is exactly the situation many stores inherited from Stocky, described in Incoming inventory stuck after Stocky. Before uninstalling, receive what has arrived, close what will not, cancel what was never sent, and check the incoming figure on a couple of products afterwards. If you must leave a PO open, note its lines and quantities so you can correct incoming by hand later.

The second is the cost policy. If the app has been writing cost per item on receipt, that stops the day you uninstall, and Shopify's cost figure will drift from reality as prices change at your suppliers. Decide who updates cost afterwards and how, because margin reports read that field. Nothing needs doing in the app; this is a process to replace.

There is no third. The app sets no theme code, creates no products, and holds no customer data, so there is nothing to clean out of the storefront and nothing to request deletion of beyond the automatic process described above.

Switching rather than leaving

If you are moving to another tool, the PO CSV is your import file, or the closest thing to one. Most purchasing apps import suppliers and open POs from a spreadsheet, and the columns above map onto the fields they ask for. Shopify's own purchase orders, covered in the native purchase orders checklist, cannot be created from a file by an app at the time of writing, so the open POs would be retyped there; take the Open export and keep it to a short list first.

The costs, quantities and history you built up while using Restock Ops are not something you take with you; they are already in Shopify, and whatever you use next will read them from there. That was the point of doing it this way.

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