Read more about what to do if you need to cancel or correct a transaction.
What is the purpose of the cancellation process?
How does the cancellation/correction process work?
What is the purpose of the cancellation process?
It allows you to tell us if you have reported a transaction that for some reason now needs to be cancelled. There could be a number of reasons for this – for example:
- mortgage funds may have been returned by the solicitor because the mortgage didn’t complete as planned
- a policy may have been reported as having been issued (or put in force), but this didn't actually happen
- transactions may have been mis-reported, so either need to be cancelled from the return or corrected
Please note that PSD relates to business that has 'issued' – this is where the mortgage has completed or the policy/contract has been put on risk/issued. So firms should include only these transactions in their quarterly return.
If for some reason a firm puts the policy on risk as soon as it receives the proposal form, then this is the date that should be reported. If this results in a firm having reported sales that do then not materialise, the system will allow you to cancel the relevant transactions.
IMPORTANT: You are not required to report the cancellation of a policy which occurs during its normal life cycle – ie, where the policy has been issued and the customer decides to cancel it at some future point.
How does the cancellation/correction process work?
If you have reported a transaction to us and then realise you need to cancel or amend it, you can use the Gabriel PSD screens to find the transaction/s and manually amend/cancel them or use the XML route.
If you are using the XML route to cancel a transaction you should submit a new transaction to us containing exactly the same details as the transaction you wish to cancel. But you should mark the cancelled field as ‘True’.
If you are using the XML route to amend a transaction you should firstly submit a cancel transaction as above and then in a separate XML report send the amended transaction (i.e without the cancelled field set as ‘True’).
What if I need to cancel a transaction after I have completed the quarter’s reporting (ie, in the next quarter)?
The system will allow you to correct a transaction which you have already submitted to us. So if you follow the process detailed above, the system will place the transaction in the correct quarter when we receive it.
Can I use the same transaction number when replacing a transaction which I have cancelled or if I need to correct a transaction?
The system will only allow you to use the same transaction reference number within a report to notify us of a cancellation, not to notify us of a replacement. So when you notify us of a cancelled transaction, you can use the same transaction number in the same report as the transaction you are cancelling (all the transaction fields must be identical apart from the cancelled flag being set to 'TRUE' in the cancellation).
If you want to use the same transaction reference for a replacement, you must submit the new replacement transaction in a different report. If you use a new transaction reference for the replacement, you can submit the replacement in the same report as the cancellation. (To help you track your transactions, the new transaction reference for the replacement could be a variation of the original number, eg original reference is XY12052005A; replacement reference isXY12052005B).
The replacement should ideally be submitted within the same reporting quarter, but we recognise that this may not always be possible.
Where a transaction has failed validation (i.e. it has been rejected), then you will need to make the correction in a new report, so using the transaction number again is not an issue. If you wish to correct a transaction because you have identified that some of the information has been mis-reported, then you will need to follow the process already explained for cancelling transactions.
If we use XML files to submit our PSD should we re-send the same file with the cancelled or corrected transactions in it?
No. In this situation, we only require you to re-submit details of the cancelled or correct transactions – not the whole file.
Though in this scenario it may be easier for you to make the amendments to the transaction/s using the Gabriel[1] PSD screens.