Edit an invoice you have already sent in B2Brouter

While an invoice is a draft, you can always edit it. Once it has been sent, it depends on two things: how you sent it and whether you have reported it to a tax authority.

If the invoice can still be edited, you see the Edit button in the invoice’s top menu. If you cannot see it, the invoice is locked. This is not a problem with your screen or your browser: the sections below explain why and what you can do.

It depends on the sending method

What decides whether you can edit a sent invoice is whether the document has already reached a third party inside a network or inside B2Brouter, or whether it only went out by email.

Attachment by e-mail, or download of the document. You can edit the invoice, even when its status is Sent or Downloaded. Your customer keeps the file they already have: editing the invoice in B2Brouter does not change it.

E-mail link. You can edit the invoice, with one exception: if your customer also has a B2Brouter account with reception enabled, the invoice went straight into their Expenses section and you can no longer edit it. In that case the contact may not even have an email address, and the send works all the same.

Open network. FACe, FACeB2B, eFACT, Peppol, Chorus Pro, SDI and the other networks: you cannot edit the invoice once the network has registered it. The Registered status already means locked, even if the administration has not accepted it yet. It becomes editable again only if the network rejects it, cancels it or the send ends in Error.

This includes the invoice number. Once registered on a network, the number cannot be changed: the number is editable only while the invoice is a draft.

The Resend invoice button does not mean you can edit

On some networks, such as Peppol, the invoice shows the Resend invoice button even when it is locked. That button sends the same document again. It does not edit it.

While the status is Sending, no invoice can be edited. Wait until the send finishes.

If you have reported the invoice to a tax authority

With VeriFactu, TicketBAI, SII, SdI, KSeF, the DGFiP or any other reporting system active, a reported invoice cannot be edited, whatever the sending method. The message is “You cannot modify an invoice with a tax report made”. The correction goes through a credit note.

The same applies to an invoice that shows as Issued but has not been sent yet: issuing is a fiscal act, and the way forward is to send it.

There is one exception, meant for fixing a failed send. With the DGFiP, if every tax report of the invoice has failed and the invoice has not reached the recipient yet, you can edit it and send it again. The same goes for ZATCA and LHDN, as long as every tax report has failed.

What happens when you edit a sent invoice

When you save the changes, the invoice goes back to Draft and loses the details of the previous send. You have to send it again for your customer to receive the corrected version.

Think first about what your customer holds. If they have already received the invoice, or already paid it, editing it changes the content of a document they keep under the same number, with no trace on their side. In that case, even if B2Brouter lets you edit, the clean way is a credit note and, if needed, a new invoice.

Invoices that come in from your ERP

If your invoices reach B2Brouter over SFTP, through the API or through a connector, the correction has to exist in your source system too. Otherwise the next synchronisation creates the original document again.

If the invoice cannot be edited

The way to fix it is a credit note, created from the original invoice: open it, go to More options and select Credit note. That way 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 your customer receives invoices in their B2Brouter account, the credit note and the new invoice reach their Expenses section on their own, like the original invoice.

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

If what you need is to make the invoice disappear, see when you can delete an issued invoice. Editing and deleting follow different rules: an invoice registered on a network, with no tax report, can be deleted even when it cannot be edited.