Delete an issued invoice in B2Brouter

Deleting an invoice destroys it. B2Brouter has no recycle bin and no undo, and deleting an invoice you have already sent does not withdraw it from your customer.

So it is worth knowing before you start whether deletion is really what you need, or whether what you need is a credit note. If what you want is to correct it, first see when a sent invoice can still be edited.

When you can delete an invoice

You can always delete a draft invoice. You can also delete an invoice you have already sent, by email or over a network, as long as it has not been reported to a tax authority and as long as no credit note refers to it.

An invoice being Sent or Registered does not block deletion. What blocks it is the tax report, the credit note and the cases in the next section.

Only the account owner and users with the administrator role can delete invoices. With the View and edit role you cannot, and that is by design. If you need it, ask someone who has the role: you will find them in the Users section of the account settings.

Where the option is

Access the Income section through the main menu at the top and then Commercial invoices through the options at the top left, and open the invoice by clicking on its number:

In the invoice’s top menu, open More options and select Delete.
The invoice list also has a bin icon on each row.

B2Brouter asks you to confirm before deleting.

Why the invoice cannot be deleted

There are four reasons, and each one gives a different message when the deletion is refused.

You have already reported the invoice to a tax authority. With VeriFactu, TicketBAI, SII, SdI, KSeF, the DGFiP or any other reporting system active, a reported invoice can be neither edited nor deleted. The message is “You cannot modify an invoice with a tax report made”. The correction goes through a credit note.

A credit note already amends this invoice. The message ends with “Modified Invoice”. If you want to undo the correction, act on the credit note, not on the original.

The invoice has been issued but not yet sent. Issuing is a fiscal act, so the way forward is to send it, not to scrap it. The message is “Documents in state Issued cannot be deleted”.

You have reported one of the invoice’s payments. A tax report covers one of the recorded payments, and deleting the invoice would take it away too. The message is “Some payments have been declared to the tax authority and prevent deletion”.

There is a fifth message, and it is not about the invoice but about you: “Only admins of the project can delete invoices”. This one appears on received invoices as well.

If the invoice has already reached your customer

Deleting it from your account changes nothing on theirs. Your customer keeps the document they received, whether you sent it by email or over a network, and the tax authority keeps whatever you reported to it.

The correct way to fix it is a credit note, created from the original invoice so that the reference between the two is kept. If you also have to issue the correct document, create a new invoice with the next number of the series.

If you sent the invoice to FACe and have already received a status for it, More options also offers Request cancellation, where you can state the reason. That is a request to the receiving authority, not a deletion.

Deletion is permanent

Once the deletion goes through, the invoice disappears along with its lines and its taxes. There is no bin to recover it from, neither in the portal nor in the API.

If you deleted an invoice by mistake, you have to create it again. The number and the date are editable in the form, so you can put the original ones back. Do not send it again if your customer already had it, or they will receive the document twice.