Getting paid
Three ways to reverse money, and they should not be gated the same.
A credit note is paper. A refund is cash leaving the bank. A write-off is an admission that you are never getting paid — and it is the one a finance team most wants a second signature on, however small it is.
So the thresholds differ, and one of them is zero.
Gating
Two thresholds you set, and one that does not exist.
A credit note below your threshold approves itself and says so on the record. Above it, a real approval. A refund is gated at a lower figure, deliberately — cash out of the door deserves a tighter bar than a paper credit.
A write-off has no threshold at all. Every one needs approval, whatever the amount, because the number is not the risk — the habit is.
- A submission needs an actual sentence —
Enforced, with the refusal saying why: so the approver understands the ask rather than receiving a blank request.
- Approval is checked before the state moves —
If nobody can approve, you are told before the credit note leaves draft, rather than after it is stuck.
- Rejection returns it to draft —
So it can be fixed and resubmitted, rather than dying.
- Applying a credit behaves exactly like cash —
It creates an adjustment that flows through the same allocation, the same balance, the same aging and the same export. One path, not two.
- Voiding is refused once anything has been applied —
By name. The trail stays readable.
Refunds
The two completion routes cannot be confused.
A refund through the gateway completes when the gateway says so, and marking it done by hand is refused by name. An offline refund completes when somebody records it. Neither path can be used for the other.
A gateway refund demands a source payment that actually went through that gateway, rather than accepting any payment and failing later.
And when a refund succeeds, a credit note that was partly used against invoices does not then claim to be a pure refund — it reports what it actually is.
- A credit note cannot exceed itself —
The database re-sums every application and refuses the write, the same way it does for payments.
- A partial credit keeps the original line's detail —
Unit price, discount, tax class and classification code all carry over, so a credit against two of five lines is still a correct document.
- Currencies are refused, not converted —
A credit note in one currency cannot be applied to an invoice in another. There is no conversion anywhere in this module.
- A write-off leaves the invoice readable —
The balance goes to zero and the invoice is marked written off, so it leaves the aging report while the reason stays attached to it.
›Can a credit note be emailed to the customer?
The document is generated and stored when it is issued. Sending it is not an action in the product today — worth knowing if your process expects one.
›Where do these live in the interface?
Credit notes have their own screens. Refunds and write-offs are reached from the documents they belong to rather than from lists of their own.
›Can a paid invoice be voided?
No. The only route is a credit note, and the refusal says so.