Document Cancel Document
Sooner or later somebody commits a document they should not have. An invoice goes out on the wrong customer, a receipt voucher is entered twice, a stock issue leaves the warehouse on paper but never in reality. The natural instinct is to look for an "undo" button — something that puts the document back the way it was before anyone pressed Save.
There isn't one. Nama has no un-commit: once a document is committed, Draft is greyed out and stays greyed out, and no toolbar button turns a live document back into a scratchpad. That is deliberate. A committed document has already produced effects — an entry in the ledger, a movement in the warehouse, a debt line against a customer — and quietly rewinding it would leave a gap in the numbering and no trace that it ever existed.
What Nama offers instead is a Document Cancel Document: a small document of its own whose entire job is to name one or more committed documents and cancel them. Because the cancellation is itself a document, it has a number, a date, a description and an author, and it can be found, printed and audited later. And because it is a document, it can be deleted — which is what makes it reversible.
You will find it under Basic → Documents → Document Cancel Document. It is part of the base installation (licence basic), so it is available on every system.
What the screen looks like
The screen is deliberately small. Above the grid sits the usual document header — the Book and Code that give the cancellation its own number, the Issue Date, the Value Date and the Fiscal Period — and then the fields that do the work:
| Field | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Cancelled Document | The document you are cancelling. Any document type in the system can be chosen here; master files cannot. |
| Restore Cancelled Doc As Draft After Deleting Cancel Document | Decides what state the documents come back in when this cancellation is later deleted. More on this below. |
| Attachment 1 … Attachment 5 | Five file slots, for the credit note, the signed memo or the e-mail that justifies the cancellation. |
| Description | Why. On an e-invoicing system this text travels to the tax authority as the cancellation reason, so it is worth writing properly. |
Underneath, a Details grid repeats the same Cancelled Document reference once per row, with a Description of its own beside it. That is how you cancel a batch: the header reference and every row in the grid are treated as one list, duplicates are ignored, and each document in it is cancelled by this one record. Then comes the usual Dimensions group.
Notice what is not there: there is no Term field. A document term decides how a document behaves, and this one behaves exactly one way, so it does not need one.
There are no buttons specific to this screen either — it carries the standard toolbar every screen carries, and nothing more. The cancellation happens when you save.
What committing it actually does
Saving the cancel document runs, for each document named on it, the same unwinding the system would run if you deleted that document — and then stops one step short of throwing it away.
- The effects are reversed. The journal entry comes back out of the ledger, the stock movement comes back out of the warehouse, the debt line stops counting. This goes through the same background processing that produced the effects in the first place, so if a cancelled document's figures still look wrong a moment later, the place to look is the Business Requests list.
- The document is marked Cancelled. Its status badge changes from Stable to Cancelled, and the same status appears in list views and searches.
- The document stays. It keeps its number, keeps its lines and stays visible in the list — which is the whole point. The history shows that document number 4711 existed and was cancelled, rather than showing a hole where 4711 used to be.
- The document becomes read-only. Open a cancelled document and every field is greyed. It cannot be edited, and it cannot be deleted either — the delete is refused because the document is cancelled. To get at it again you have to undo the cancellation first.
Because cancelling is a permission on the Document Cancel Document screen rather than on the invoice, this is the screen to grant or withhold when you want to control who may take documents back.
What will stop a cancellation
The system checks each named document before it will let you save, and it reports the failures per row, so a batch where one document is refused tells you which one and why. A document cannot be cancelled if:
- It is still a draft. A draft has produced no effects, so there is nothing to reverse — delete it instead.
- It has been revised. Unrevise it first; see Revise and unrevise.
- It is waiting on an approval. Let the cycle finish, or revoke the request, and then cancel.
- Another cancel document already cancelled it. The message names the cancellation that got there first.
- Its fiscal period is closed. Reversing effects is a transaction like any other, and a closed period refuses it — see Fiscal Period Control.
- Another document was created from it. If a delivery was raised from the order, the order cannot be cancelled while that delivery exists; the message names the document that stands in the way. Cancel the downstream document first and work backwards.
- The system generated it. Documents the system produced automatically as the final step of another document are not cancelled on their own — cancel the document that generated them, and they go with it.
- It has stock documents behind it that were not generated by the system. An invoice whose goods left the warehouse on a manually entered issue voucher is refused, because cancelling the invoice would leave that voucher stranded. Where a business genuinely wants this allowed, the sales and purchase invoice and return terms carry a switch for it — Allow Cancel Even If It Has Non-System Related Stock Documents — and ticking it on the term the invoice uses lets the cancellation through.
Putting the documents back
This is the part that makes a Document Cancel Document worth understanding: deleting it undoes the cancellation. The documents it names are restored, and the switch on the header decides in what state.
Leave the switch off — the default — and each document is committed again exactly as it was. Its effects are recreated, its status goes back to Stable, and as far as the ledger is concerned the whole episode never happened.
Tick Restore Cancelled Doc As Draft After Deleting Cancel Document and each document comes back as a draft instead. Its effects stay reversed, the record becomes editable again, and it sits there waiting to be corrected and re-saved. This is the closest thing Nama has to "give me that document back so I can fix it", and it is the setting to reach for when the document was wrong rather than unwanted.
Restoring is not a formality: each document is put through its normal save checks again. Required fields, the validation rules configured for its type and its fiscal period are all re-examined, so if the period has closed in the meantime, or the record no longer satisfies a rule that has been tightened since, the deletion of the cancel document is refused and everything stays as it is.
Restore state is decided when you delete, not when you cancel
The switch is read at the moment the cancel document is deleted. If you cancelled with it off and then decide you would rather have the documents back as drafts, open the cancel document, tick the switch, save, and then delete it.
Changing your mind about part of a batch
A committed cancel document can be edited like any other document, and it behaves sensibly when you do. Remove a row and that document is restored, following the same switch. Add a row and that document is cancelled, subject to all the checks above. Everything you left alone stays as it was. So a cancellation that swept up one document too many does not have to be deleted and rebuilt — just take the row out and save.
When the document went to a tax authority
On an installation that submits electronic invoices, the cancel document has a second life: it is itself a submittable document. When the invoice it cancels had already been sent to the portal, the cancellation is picked up by the e-documents submission alongside ordinary invoices and sent as a cancellation request, carrying the cancel document's Description as the reason.
Two consequences follow, and both are worth knowing before somebody rings the support desk:
- Tax authorities give you a window. How long a submitted invoice may still be cancelled comes from the taxpayer configuration; where nothing is set, the system works to three days.
- A cancellation the authority has already accepted cannot be taken back. Once the portal has recorded the invoice as cancelled, deleting the cancel document is refused — the restore would put the invoice back in the system while the authority still holds it as cancelled. Issue a fresh document instead.
Electronic receipts and receipt returns that have already gone to the portal are a step stricter again: they cannot be cancelled this way at all.
Where this sits next to the other ways of freezing a document
Three mechanisms look similar from a distance and do quite different things:
| What it does | How you undo it | |
|---|---|---|
| Revise | Stamps a committed document as checked and locks it. Effects untouched. | Unrevise it |
| Cancel | Reverses the effects, keeps the document and its number, marks it Cancelled. | Delete the cancel document |
| Delete | Reverses the effects and removes the document, its attachments and its number. | Nothing — it is gone |
Cancelling is the middle path, and it is usually the right one: the effects go away, the evidence stays. If you want the full picture of how a document gets from draft to live in the first place, the lifecycle section of What is Nama ERP walks through it.