Invoices and documents · 3 min read

Cancelling an invoice — deleting, voiding, or a credit note

When to delete, cancel, or issue a credit note against an invoice. The correct procedure for every document type and status.

Four different operations

Taxorio distinguishes four operations — each has different semantics and different legal consequences. Go by what actually happened, not by whichever one is closest to hand.

Operation	What it does	When to use it
Delete	The invoice physically disappears from your records	A proforma invoice that hasn't been sent yet and has no linked tax document for an advance
Cancel	The invoice gets the status Cancelled — it stays in the history, but doesn't count toward VAT or income	An issued or overdue invoice that hasn't been paid and you don't need to refund the client any money
Clear payment	A paid invoice goes back to unpaid; for an advance, the tax document for the received payment is cancelled at the same time	The payment actually never arrived, arrived somewhere else, or was recorded by mistake or with the wrong date
Credit note	A corrective tax document is created with a negative value	The money arrived and you're refunding it (or the price is dropping) — an additional change to the deal under § 42 ZDPH

Overview by document type

Standard invoice (STANDARD) and final invoice (FINAL)

Issued / Overdue → Edit, Cancel, or a credit note
Paid → Clear payment (the payment never happened) or a credit note (the money is being refunded). Neither editing nor cancelling is possible for a paid invoice.
Cancelled → no action available (the document is closed); the Share and Send buttons disappear too — a cancelled document isn't sent to the client.

For a final invoice, the correction cap is the whole supply, not the "amount due" — after deducting the advance, that's only the balance. So even the part of the job the client paid for with the advance can be returned.

⚠️ An issued invoice can't be physically deleted — it's a tax document that may have been sent to the client and entered VAT records. The correct route is cancellation or a credit note.

Proforma invoice (PROFORMA)

Unpaid, with no linked documents → Delete (a proforma invoice isn't a tax document) or Cancel
Paid → deleting isn't possible. Payment never arrived / was recorded by mistake → Clear payment (for a VAT payer this cancels the tax document for the received payment in the same step). Money arrived and you're refunding it → a credit note against the tax document for the advance, and only then can the proforma invoice be cancelled. Cancelling a paid advance is possible, but as long as the tax document for the payment lives beneath it, Taxorio won't allow it — that document would go on carrying income and VAT.
With a live final invoice → resolve the final invoice first; as long as it exists, neither the advance nor its tax document can be corrected.

ℹ️ Each advance can have only one active final invoice. Once you cancel it, you can issue a new one — and you should: the advance is paid, so the supply needs a document, and a standard invoice instead of a final one would tax it a second time (it wouldn't deduct the advance).

Tax document for an advance

A tax document for an advance is immutable — it can't be deleted or cancelled. It's a tax document that has entered VAT records and has to stay there. To correct an advance, see Credit notes → Credit note against a tax document for an advance.

Credit note (CREDIT_NOTE)

Issued, not yet refunded (Issued) → can be cancelled — if the payment hasn't gone through yet and the credit note was created by mistake.
Paid / refund has happened (Paid) → can't be cancelled directly. Recorded the refund by mistake? More actions → Clear payment puts the credit note back among the unsettled ones, and only then can it be cancelled.
Exception: a credit note that a proforma invoice's cancellation relied on can never be cancelled — without it the tax document for the advance would stay in the return.

A credit note can't be deleted — it's a tax document that must stay in your records. And you can't issue another credit note against it: corrections are only possible against a standard invoice, a final invoice, and a tax document for an advance. If you credited more than you should have, cancel the credit note (as long as the refund hasn't happened) and issue a new one with the correct amount.

How to cancel an invoice

Open the invoice's detail.
Click More actions (the menu in the top right).
Choose Cancel.
Confirm in the dialog — the invoice gets the status Cancelled.

💡 A cancelled invoice appears in the list with the status Cancelled and stays visible in the history. But it doesn't enter the VAT return or the income statistics.

How to clear a payment entered by mistake

Open the paid invoice's detail.
More actions → Clear payment (it's not in the edit form — a paid document can't be edited).
Confirm. The invoice goes back to unpaid, and for an advance the tax document for the received payment is cancelled.
Fix whatever was wrong, and mark the invoice paid again — with the correct date.

⚠️ If you've already filed a VAT return or a VAT control statement for the period the payment fell into, clearing the payment means you'll need a supplementary return and a follow-up VAT control statement. Taxorio doesn't track filed returns — it only warns you with a dialog.

A cancelled invoice and the public link

The Share button disappears from a cancelled document. A link you sent the client earlier deliberately stays working — the web invoice shows a Cancelled banner on it, so the client sees the document's current status.

Common issues

Can't cancel — the invoice is paid. Payment never arrived → Clear payment; money is being refunded → Correct document.
Can't edit — the document is paid or cancelled, or it's a credit note or a tax document for an advance (those are immutable).
Can't delete a proforma invoice — it's paid, or it has a linked tax document for an advance.
Can't correct a tax document for an advance — a final invoice has already settled the advance. The correction belongs on the final invoice; if the supply never happened, cancel the final invoice first.
Can't clear an advance's payment — a live final invoice is hanging off it (cancel it if unpaid; for a paid one the only way through is a corrective document), or a credit note has already been issued against the tax document for the advance. A partial credit note means the rest of the payment still carries income and VAT — credit-note it too, or continue with a final invoice; on a fully corrected document, the correction has already resolved it.

A fresh start: erasing your whole record set

When an initial import from another program goes wrong (missing items, missing payments, a bad file), deleting documents one by one gets you nowhere. Under Settings → Data → Erase data you delete, all at once, every invoice (issued ones included), expenses, clients, inbox documents, recurring invoice schedules and finished exports; the invoice numbering sequence resets to the start. Your account, company settings, bank accounts, price list, tax regime and subscription don't change — this isn't deleting your account.

The action is irreversible and confirmed twice: entering the account's email address and typing the phrase DELETE DATA. Before erasing, you can download a backup under the Data export subsection. It's deliberately only possible by hand in the app — neither the AI assistant nor the MCP connector will erase data.

⚠️ Erasing data isn't a substitute for cancellation or a credit note. If some invoices have already reached clients, they'll disappear from your records too — handle documents like that with a cancellation or a corrective document instead.

Legal basis

Physically deleting tax documents conflicts with the duty to keep records under the VAT Act. Cancellation (CANCELLED) is the correct route — the document exists in the records, but is marked invalid. A credit note (§ 42 ZDPH) is the mandatory tool for correcting VAT whenever the tax base or the amount of tax changes.