Sixty days is long enough to contain a full return cycle for almost any store, and short enough that the trail is still warm. It is where a returns audit should start.
Why not longer
A refund from eight months ago with no restock is probably beyond fixing: the unit was found and sold, or was lost, and nobody remembers which. Sixty days of history gives you cases you can still act on, with people who still recall the parcel.
Shopify also limits how far back an app can read orders without additional permissions, so 60 days is the practical default, with a longer backfill as a paid step where it is available.
What the window shows
Every refund in the period, and for each refunded line, whether it was restocked. Every return started in the period and whether it was received and dispositioned. Every disposition of damaged or missing. From those, three totals: unrecovered from refunds, unrecovered from open returns, and confirmed losses.
Split the window in two, last 30 days against the 30 before, and you have a direction: is the leak growing or shrinking?
What it cannot show
It cannot see the shelf. A refund with no restock means the record and the adjustment disagree; it does not prove the unit is sitting in a bin. Someone still has to look. An honest audit says "these records disagree," and stops there.
It also cannot see inventory adjustments that happened before it started watching. Shopify keeps no long log of those, which is why restock-integrity checks work forward from the day they begin.
Reading the result
A store with 200 orders and 40 refunds in the window might find eight unrestocked lines worth $600. That is the floor on what returns cost this quarter. It is not a judgment; it is a starting balance.
The useful question is what happens to that figure next month. Down means the habit changed. Flat means it did not. Up means someone new is processing refunds, or volume rose, and either is worth knowing.
StockReclaim scans the last 60 days on install and shows the total before you configure anything. See install and first scan.