Correcting an issued invoice (Rechnungskorrektur)

An issued invoice cannot be edited. To fix one you issue a correction, a second document that withdraws the first. In German this is a Rechnungskorrektur.

Correct and continue in one step

Usually you cancel an invoice because something on it was wrong, and what you want is the same invoice with the mistake fixed. For that, open the invoice's More actions menu and choose Correct this invoice instead of Cancel invoice:

• the original is canceled by a correction that is issued right away,
• you land in a new draft with the same recipient, lines, notes, payment terms and settings,
• tracked hours and trip costs move to the new draft, so they stay billed exactly once.

Fix what was wrong and issue the draft. Like any new invoice, it gets the next invoice number and the date you issue it on, unless you set a date yourself. If the invoice was addressed to a saved client, the draft uses the client's current details, so a wrong address is fixed on the client.

On a plan with one invoice per month, a canceled invoice no longer counts toward its month, so correcting the one invoice you issued this month leaves room to issue the corrected one right away.

The rest of this page describes the two steps separately, which is what Cancel invoice does when you only want to withdraw an invoice.

How it works

Choose to cancel the issued invoice. Steerd creates a corrective draft that mirrors the original: the same lines, the same recipient, the same tax treatment.

At this point nothing has been canceled yet.

The step that actually cancels the original

Finalizing the corrective is what cancels the original. Until you issue the correction, it is just a draft, and the original invoice still stands as an open, payable document.

This catches people out. Creating the correction and walking away leaves you with an original that is still live and a draft nobody issued.

Once you issue the correction:

• the original moves to Canceled,
• the correction gets its own invoice number, never the original's,
• the time and travel the original billed are released,
• the original stops counting toward a monthly invoice limit. A correction never counts either.

Settled, or still open

Whether the correction leaves anything to pay depends on the original.

• The original was never paid. The correction cancels a demand nobody paid, so nothing is owed in either direction. The correction is issued as Settled, and there is nothing left to do.
• The original was paid. Your client paid for something you have now withdrawn, so you owe them that amount back. The correction stays Open until you refund it. Once you have, open the correction and choose Mark as settled.

If you marked one settled by mistake, or the client pays the canceled invoice after all, choose Mark as open to reopen it.

What happens to billed time and travel

The tracked hours and trip costs the original invoice carried become available again, so you can put them on a new invoice. With Correct this invoice they are not released but moved straight to the new draft.

The record of the original having billed them is not deleted. The original invoice still exists and still says what it said. Both facts are kept, because both are true.

Releasing trip components also unblocks reverting the underlying trip, which Steerd refuses while a trip's costs sit on a live invoice.

One correction per invoice

An invoice can be corrected once. If a correction already exists, Steerd hands you the existing one rather than making a second.

A correction remembers who the original was for

The correction is addressed to whoever the original was addressed to, even if that client has since been renamed, moved, or deleted entirely. This is the case corrections most need to handle: you are correcting a document from the past, and it has to keep describing the past.

What you cannot change on a correction

Because it mirrors a sealed document, most of a correction is fixed. If the original went out as a plain PDF and lacked details an e-invoice needs, the correction cannot become an e-invoice either: the missing details live in a sealed document that can no longer be changed. Steerd says so rather than failing at issue.