Four buttons, and only one of them is a void — transcript

Play this as a presentation — one slide per step, with the same narration. Every word of every step is on this page.

This presentation is for whoever at GadgetSphere has just realised a finalised document is wrong. In about eleven minutes you will know which of five operations you actually want, which ones your company is still allowed to use, and why the answer changed the month you switched e-invoicing on.

Step 1 — Choose the operation before you press anything

After this step you will stop reaching for Void by reflex. The platform offers five different ways to deal with a wrong document and they take five different code paths from the same screen. Editing a draft undoes nothing because nothing has posted. Undo to Draft returns a finalised document to editable and releases the links it was holding. Discard throws away something that should never have existed. Void cancels a document that genuinely happened and keeps the trail. And a credit note, return or refund note is not an undo at all — it is a new document with its own number. Pick the one that matches what actually happened, not the one nearest the mouse.

Reference: What a Void Undoes — Four different ways to unwind a document, and only one of them is a void

Step 2 — Know what the button does while you wait

After this step you will know why nothing has reversed yet when the screen comes back. Pressing Void does three things synchronously: it runs the refusal checks and stops dead if any of them fires, it sets the document to void and stores the reason you typed, and it drops exactly one row into your tenant’s job queue. That is the whole of it. Every reversal happens afterwards, in separate jobs, picked up by a worker. So the document reads VOID immediately and your ledger, your stock and your cash book are all still untouched at that instant.

Reference: What a Void Undoes — What actually happens when you press it

Step 3 — Expect a void to be slower than a finalise

After this step you will stop escalating something that is merely queued. Finalise inserts its queue row and then hands the work straight to a worker thread, so the chain usually starts before the response reaches your browser. A void does not do that. It inserts the row and waits for the next tenant tick to pick it up. The practical rule is that the first thing to do when a report still shows a voided document is nothing at all: look again in a minute. Stuck is almost always the word people use for queued, and the two need completely different responses.

Reference: What a Void Undoes — A void is slower to take effect than a Finalise, and this is measurable

Step 4 — Read the refusal, because it tells you the fix

After this step you will treat a refused void as an instruction rather than an error. Four checks run before anything is written, so a refused void changes nothing at all. Only a final document can be voided. A document already used downstream is refused and the message lists the blocking documents by type and number — work backwards through that list. A sales order whose picking list is already at pending picking is refused because stock is physically being pulled, and the error code on that one branch is mislabelled, so read the message rather than the code. The fourth is the one that catches everybody.

Reference: What a Void Undoes — When BigLedger refuses to void at all

Step 5 — Understand why e-invoicing takes Void away

After this step you will know why the button worked last quarter and does not now. Once a company’s e-invoice status is enabled, sales invoices, returns, credit notes, debit notes and refund notes cannot be voided at all, a cash bill can be voided only until its e-invoice has actually been submitted, and a self-billed purchase document cannot be voided either. That is not a permission anybody can grant you. It is the platform refusing to let you quietly cancel a document the tax authority already holds a copy of. Inside seventy-two hours of validation the route is a cancellation request; past it, a credit note.

Reference: Cancelling and Correcting a Validated E-Invoice — The one rule that decides everything

Step 6 — Accept that a void is permanent, and so is the number

After this step you will treat the decision as final, because it is. There is no un-void. Nothing in the platform turns a voided document back into a live one, and the only route onward is to key a new document, which will carry a new number. The voided document keeps its own number for good — numbers are never returned to the pool — so a gap in your invoice sequence is not evidence of anything missing. That permanence is the point: a void that could be reversed would be an edit, and the trail is what makes it safe to cancel a real transaction.

Reference: Document Numbering — The three numbers on every document

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Choose the operation before you press anything"]
  s2["Step 2 — Know what the button does while you wait"]
  s3["Step 3 — Expect a void to be slower than a finalise"]
  s4["Step 4 — Read the refusal, because it tells you the fix"]
  s5["Step 5 — Understand why e-invoicing takes Void away"]
  s6["Step 6 — Accept that a void is permanent, and so is the number"]
  s1 --> s2
  s2 --> s3
  s3 --> s4
  s4 --> s5
  s5 --> s6
  

Check yourself

Three to five questions on what you just heard. Every correct answer links to the page that makes it correct, so you can check the source, not just the mark.

Next: Reversed, negated, removed: three kinds of undo in one press · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation