Somebody sends an invoice, spots a wrong line ten minutes later, and goes looking for the edit button. There isn’t one. There’s a button that raises a credit note, and on that first occasion it feels like a worse answer than the one they wanted.
We hear this more than anything else, so it’s worth explaining properly. The alternative isn’t obviously wrong until you look at what it costs.
What an editable invoice actually is
An invoice isn’t a document you produced. It’s a claim you made, at a particular moment, with a number on it, to somebody who now has a copy.
The moment a second version of invoice 2026-0184 can exist, that number stops identifying anything. Your customer’s accounts payable clerk has one document. You have another. Both say 2026-0184. From where each person is sitting, both are the real one.
That’s the failure, and it doesn’t announce itself. It turns up months later in a payment that doesn’t match, a VAT return that won’t tie back, or an auditor asking which of two figures you actually filed on.
Sequential numbering is the other half of it. Most tax regimes want your invoice numbers to run in an unbroken sequence, because a gap is where a suppressed sale hides. A system that lets you edit a finalized document will sooner or later let you delete one, and then there’s a hole in the sequence that you get to explain.
What we do instead
Corrections are their own documents.
- A credit note cancels the original, in whole or in part. Both documents exist, both are numbered, and the net position is the sum of the two.
- A debit note goes the other way when you undercharged.
- The original stays exactly as your customer received it.
This isn’t a workaround for a missing feature. It’s what an auditor expects to see, and it’s what the correction looked like back when invoices were paper. The trail reads: here’s what we claimed, here’s where we were wrong, here’s the correction, in that order, each with a date on it.
Where the line actually sits
None of this applies before you finalize. A draft is a draft. Edit it, delete it, get it wrong half a dozen times. Nothing has been claimed, nothing has been numbered, and nothing has been posted to your books. The whole constraint lives on one side of one button, and that button tells you what it’s about to do.
What we have worked on is making the credit note cheap. Raise it from the invoice itself, in Documents → the invoice → Credit, with the lines carried across, so correcting a mistake takes a few seconds rather than a retyping exercise. The constraint is fixed. The friction around it isn’t, and that’s the part we keep sanding down.
The honest cost
There is one. Finalize an invoice with a typo in the customer’s address and the fix is two documents where a competitor’s is one edit, with your customer seeing both. On a busy day that’s genuinely annoying, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.
We think it’s the right trade, because that cost is small, immediate and visible. The cost of the alternative is large, delayed, and lands on you at the worst possible moment: mid-audit, or mid-quarter, when a number won’t reconcile and the reason is eighteen months in the past.
Software should take the inconvenience that shows up today over the one that shows up when you can’t do anything about it.
The full behaviour, including what finalizing posts to your accounts, is in the guide: invoicing and documents.