# Cancel an invoice or issue a credit note: which one applies

Source: https://lucanto.eu/guides/cancel-invoice-or-credit-note
Published: 2026-09-14

An issued invoice from a VAT-registered supplier cannot be cancelled — the tax point has passed, so it is corrected with a credit note instead. Lucanto offers cancellation only where no such effect occurred: on an advance invoice, for a supplier not registered for VAT, and only while the document is unpaid and has not been transmitted to an electronic system.

When an issued invoice is wrong there are two ways out: void it, or correct it with a second document. You do not get to pick — what decides is whether the document has already had a tax effect. Lucanto knows this and will not offer you the route that is not allowed; this guide explains why.

Rules differ by country, and this guide describes the shape they share rather than any one statute. Check what applies where you invoice.

## The short answer

**Registered for VAT and the invoice is issued? Cancelling is off the table — you correct it with a credit note.** Issuing created a tax liability and the document is part of your records. Tax law almost everywhere provides a way to correct the taxable amount; it does not provide a way to make the document never have existed.

Cancellation is for the cases where no such effect occurred.

## When Lucanto allows a cancellation

All of these have to hold at once:

1. **The document is issued or sent** — a draft is not cancelled, it is simply deleted.
2. **It is unpaid, not even partly.** Any payment received blocks cancellation: money has moved against the document and that has to be settled, which a credit note does and a cancellation does not.
3. **It has not been transmitted to an electronic system.**
4. **And it is a document with no tax effect** — either an advance invoice, which is not a tax document, or an invoice from a supplier who is not registered for VAT.

If even one of those does not hold, _Cancel_ stays greyed out in the status panel — along with a line saying which one it was.

## Why you see it in the panel

A blocked action does not hide. It stays in the _What can happen next_ list, greyed out, carrying its reason — for example "A VAT payer's invoice cannot be canceled — use a credit note instead." That is deliberate: if the action disappeared, you could not tell whether you were looking in the wrong place or it genuinely was not allowed. What the panel looks like is covered in the [invoice statuses guide](/guides/invoice-statuses).

## What to do instead

Issue a credit note through **Follow-up document**, straight from the original invoice. The link to the original is created for you, so the credit note does not need you to look up which invoice it corrects — and the overview shows both documents together.

If the amount goes up rather than down, the same route issues a debit note. Both are correcting documents tied to the original. What a credit note has to contain is covered in [credit note](/credit-note).

## A cancelled invoice is not forgotten

A cancelled document **stays in the number series** with the status _Canceled_. The series has to be unbroken, so the number is not released and never reused — and the document's history shows when it was cancelled and by whom. That is exactly the difference from deleting, which is reserved for drafts.