Cancelling a project

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The “Cancel Project” button

Cancelling a project in the VMS can be straightforward, if the Project is still young. The “Cancel Project” icon can be found to the top-right of your VMS Project window. When you click on this button, if the VMS is satisfied that your project is allowed to be cancelled, you will be reminded that this action cannot be undone and you will be asked to confirm the cancellation.

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A cancelled project will gain the Cancelled status (as opposed to being Archived). It will be locked off from any further work. However, it is possible to “re-open” a duplicate of a cancelled project (more on this later).

I can’t cancel my project — why?

“Sorry, you cannot cancel this project”

When you try to cancel a Project, the VMS assesses:

• Has this Project already sent an invoice?

• Has this Project progressed too far into production?

If the VMS answers “yes” to either of these questions, it will block your request with an error message like this. If you are still certain that you need to cancel this Project, the appropriate steps to take are provided in the following sections.

How do I cancel a project if… work has not started, but an invoice has been sent?

If an invoice has already been sent or production credit has been used, you won’t be able to cancel your project for yourself. Accounts will need to ensure that the appropriate steps are taken to cancel the invoice and balance the ledgers. 

You should contact the Accounts department, who will take care of this for you.

How do I cancel a project if… work has started?

A project can be freely cancelled while its status is Draft, Active, or Pre-Production. If your team has commenced any billable work on the project, then the VMS will prevent you from cancelling it.

You will need to contact the Accounts department, who will ensure that the appropriate steps are taken to recognise the work already completed before removing the project for you.

How do I re-open a cancelled project?

For accounting and data management reasons, you cannot re-open a cancelled project.

However, if you have a cancelled project that you don’t want to rebuild from scratch, you can duplicate this project as a starting point. (This is almost as good as re-opening it.)

This duplicated project will have a new project number. It will also have copied across all of the data and assets from the cancelled project, with the exception of scheduling:

• All calendar appointments will have been removed

• Any dates associated with document, shoots, and edits will have been removed.

To find your cancelled project, you may need to add “cancelled” to your project list status filter.

After opening your cancelled project, look again to the icon in the top-right corner. The “Cancel Project” option will have been replaced by “Reopen Project”.