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.

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.

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.

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.