Error in a sent invoice? Here is how to fix it with a credit invoice

Why you do not edit a sent invoice

Your invoices must be numbered consecutively without gaps, and your records must be verifiable. If you edit a sent invoice afterwards, your version and your client's version diverge and your VAT return may no longer match your invoices. In an audit, that immediately raises questions. A credit invoice keeps the trail complete: the original invoice, the correction and any new invoice can all be traced.

How to draw up a credit invoice

A credit invoice is a regular invoice with negative amounts that reverses the original invoice in whole or in part. It gets its own consecutive invoice number from your normal sequence, today's date and a clear reference to the original invoice, for example 'credit of invoice 2026-041'. You state the same description, the same VAT rate and the same amounts as on the original invoice, but negative. If you are correcting only part, you credit only that part.

If the invoice was substantively wrong, for example a wrong rate or amount, you send a new, correct invoice with its own number right after the credit invoice. The client then has three documents that add up: the incorrect invoice, the credit and the correct invoice.

Processing the VAT correctly

The credit invoice reduces your turnover and the VAT due in the period in which you issue it. If you had already included the original invoice in an earlier VAT return, the credit invoice corrects that automatically in the current return; you do not need to amend an old return. Only if, on balance, you declared too much or too little VAT over a closed period and the correction no longer runs through a current return does a supplementary return come into play.

Common situations

Client already paid? Then you refund the credited amount or offset it against the new invoice; record what you agreed. Invoice sent to the wrong client? Credit the full invoice and send the right client a new one. Client wants a discount afterwards? That too is handled with a (partial) credit invoice, not by rewriting the original. And an invoice you created but never sent may simply be deleted or edited, as long as your numbering stays consecutive.