With recurring billing, how to cancel an invoice that is several periods in the past?

← Billing & Invoice Management FAQ ← Accounting Support FAQ

In recurring billing, businesses successively issue invoices for a certain period – like monthly invoices for an active subscription. When cancelling one of the successive invoices, the related item's Next Service Period Start is reset to the value determined with the previous invoice. Assume, for example, you cancel the February invoice in September – the Next Service Period Start is set to 1st of February. Consequently, the next invoice run (in September, following the example) would produce an invoice that covers all invoicing periods from the cancellation up to the current one, even they are already correctly invoiced.

How to prevent this from happening?

Here is how to proceed:

1. Cancel the relevant invoice.
2. Correct the invoice source data as necessary.

3. Reissue the invoice for the same period.

   Create a new invoice from the source record where the invoice period (Service Period Start and Service Period End on the invoice or Period Start and Period End on the invoice run) is the same as the period of the invoice run that produced the original, canceled invoice.

4. Manually adjust the item's Next Service Period Start to the value prior to the cancellation.

   This will continue the invoicing cycle without including the intermediate invoicing periods.