What is the best way to edit processed orders after payment?

Thank you for the reply.
Let me be more specific.

If we change the status, it will let us edit the order items, that’s great! But here is what doesn’t make sense:

1) When adding a new item, there doesn’t seem to be a way to select the variations and options. All I get is a way to add empty “meta fields” to the item. We use a plugin for order addons so that we have the variation as well as addons, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to add or change variations and addons from the order screen in a visual way. Do you know of any method to make this easier so that when we add or change the item, we can select from the available variations and addons with proper inventory controls?
What would be the most helpful is to get a view like we do in the frontend. Just pick all the options and then “add to order”. Making people type things into a bunch of empty meta field boxes is just asking for problems and mistakes, and it’s a lot of work if we have 20 addons (meta fields) to add.

2) If we adjust the items, and this changes the price, what happens when we set the order status back to Completed or whatever it should be? Does it take an additional payment from Stripe for the difference? Will Stripe give a partial refund (not a full refund, we know how to do full refunds)? Do we have to do this manually to mark the order complete again? If the price changes, does Woo even care? I mean, does it just show the new price regardless of the fact that there was a previous payment for a different amount?

Unfortunately, with our orders, people change things all the time because the orders are open for months until the event happens, so changing orders is very common and we need to make this process smoother.

Here is the edit screen when I edit an order and add a new item.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/k3k0hzz9ihlvwco/2022-11-01_12-25-36.png?dl=0

When I click to edit the existing item, it has all the meta fields already filled in, of course. But when I add a new/replacement item, there are no meta fields, there is no way to select my variation or addons/options when adding the new item to the order. I can’t even “browse” for it, I have to specifically know how to search for it by name to add it.

I appreciate the links, I’ve read through them and the comments people have left on those snippets and it doesn’t seem like something safe to use as-is. The idea of cloning an order and applying a discount is better than doing a full refund and then making a new order, that makes sense. But the ability to clone an order doesn’t seem to be an available “normal” option in WooCommerce. Where is that feature so that the admins can do it? Adding a “credit” to a user or order is also not behavior built-in to Woo. At best we can create a one-time coupon to use?
Cloning the order is also not ideal because it means the record or the order payment is on a different order than the “real” order in the system. In other words, order #111 has the record of their actual credit card payment, but since this order was cloned and then closed/cancelled, the “real” order is now #222. This is like keeping two, or even more orders around for the full history of their order, which can get messy to keep track of.

We also have very tight inventory control, so if we have to move an order from Completed to Pending, the inventory will go back in stock where it could potentially be purchased by someone else.
Or let’s say we edit the order and add another line item, well if the product is out of stock, we can’t add the 2nd one until we delete the first one, but we can’t delete the first one because we need the reference to all those meta fields! To fix this, we have to falsely increase stock to be able to add the product before we can delete the other line item and then fix the stock again.

I know these sound like rare occurrences, but they actually happened the last time we ran our sales, many times! There was a lot of manual work closing orders, refunding, creating new orders, adjusting addons.

The biggest need we have is to be able to edit the order, change the product/variation/addons a little, and then potentially charge the difference or refund the difference. For some reason this process is so difficult and convoluted. And it becomes dangerous because of tight stock management too. Or we have to pay hundreds a year for a bunch of addons to try and make it smoother.

Maybe there isn’t a way to make this better, but thanks for listening anyway, hopefully it gives you some ideas about changing things to make it smoother for order editing in the future. Or at least just adding a product with its various options into the order from the backend.

Thanks for the suggestion.
I honestly don’t think that is a good fit for our situation either.

For one thing, these orders may need editing weeks after they’ve been paid and marked complete.
Secondly, the administrators alone want to make these changes, because the availability and specs of the products change over time and usually inventory is down to nothing once the main sales are over, so the admins have to figure out the details of order changes, not the customer.
Thirdly, on the web page for that plugin, if you scroll to the bottom and look at the screenshot for adding a product to the order, it’s the same thing we see in the Woo backend already, just a popup asking to search for a product by name and then set a quantity. But how would they select the variations and addon options? Hopefully not a big list of empty meta field boxes!

I may reach out to the plugin author and see if this can be adapted as an admin-only tool, and if adding/editing products can be done visually for variations/addons. So thanks for that.

Otherwise, like I said before, the biggest hurdle is on the admin side, not being able to adjust the product visually when adding/editing them. A big list of meta text fields is a really annoying way to edit the order.
And then handling partial refunds and partial (additional) payments could be done much more gracefully as well I think.

Thanks!

Thanks again. I submitted a support request to ask about the plugin.
I suppose you can close this thread.