In Workday, transactions, known as business process events, can have different statuses such as in-progress, completed, or canceled. It's not uncommon to cancel an in-progress event which you can accomplish from the related actions for the specific business process event. An unsubmitted business process can simply be canceled via a cancel button on the screen.
But when it comes to working out of your Workday inbox, the term cancel can be confusing. While there are typically two buttons at the bottom of an inbox item, Submit and Cancel, clicking the cancel button at the bottom of an inbox item is not the same as canceling an event. Clicking the cancel button at the bottom of an inbox item means you want to defer action on this item. In this case, from an Inbox navigation perspective, cancel means skip this item for later and show me the next inbox item if there are more than one items in your inbox.
You can initiate the cancelation of the business process event for some of your inbox items. To initiate the cancelation, you'll need to find the gear icon in the upper right corner of your inbox item. Clicking the gear icon will show you a few options and may include the option to cancel. Be aware that most of the time, canceling a business process from your inbox is not the best idea. The item in your inbox often represents a subprocess, and using the cancel option via the gear icon will only cancel the subprocess and not the entire process.
If you want to cancel the event of an inbox item, select View Details after clicking the gear icon. Selecting View Details will let you view the event directly, and from this screen, you will be able to see the originating event of the subprocess. Look for the label "Overall Process." From there, you can cancel the event from its related actions.