QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Voiding and Deleting Invoices and Sales Receipts

Sometimes, you simply want to eliminate an invoice or sales receipt, for instance when you create an invoice by mistake and want to remove its values from your accounts. QuickBooks provides two options, but for your sanity's sake, you should always void invoices and sales receipts that you don't want.

When you void an invoice or sales receipt, QuickBooks resets the dollar values to zero, so your account balances show no sign of the transaction, but it also marks the transaction as void, so you know what happened to it when you stumble upon it in the future.

If you delete an invoice or sales receipt, QuickBooks truly deletes the transaction, removing the dollar values from your accounts, but also deleting any sign of the transaction. All that remains is a hole in your numbering sequence of invoice or sales receipt numbers. If your accountant or the IRS looks at your books a few years down the road, your chances of remembering what happened to the transaction are slim. If an invoice has a payment attached to it, deleting the invoice is even more problematic.

To void an invoice or sales receipt, open the Create Invoices dialog box or Enter Sales Receipt dialog box, respectively. In the dialog box icon bar, click Previous until you see the invoice or sales receipt you want to void. In the dialog box, right-click anywhere and then choose Void Invoice (or Void Sales Receipt) on the shortcut menu. Click Save & Close.

Note

If you open the ...