Invoicing & Payments

Invoice status explained: Draft, Pending, Paid, Void

What each invoice status means, when it changes, and what you can and can't edit at each stage.

Every invoice in WatCoreLite is always in exactly one of four states. Knowing what each one means — and what you can and can't do at each stage — makes the whole system predictable.

Draft

A working copy. Fully editable — change line items, the customer, the discount, anything — and freely deletable if you started it by mistake. A Draft has no invoice number yet.

Why a Draft has no number

WatCoreLite only assigns the real, sequential invoice number when you Finalize — the moment it's actually issued. That's deliberate: since a Draft can be deleted freely, if it had already claimed a number, deleting it would leave a permanent gap in your invoice sequence. Most tax regimes expect sequential, gap-free numbering for invoices that were actually issued — not ones that were started and abandoned. By waiting until Finalize, a discarded Draft can never cause a gap.

Pending

Set automatically the moment you click Finalize. The invoice now has its permanent number, its line items are locked, and — if you track stock — the quantities on it have been deducted from inventory. A Pending invoice can't be deleted, but it can be voided if something needs correcting.

Paid

Never set by hand — it's always derived from the payments logged against the invoice. Log enough payments to cover the full balance and the status flips to Paid automatically. Log a payment that overshoots the balance and it's still allowed — the extra shows up as a credit balance rather than being blocked. Void one of those payments later, and the invoice recalculates and flips back to Pending on its own, since the balance and status are always computed fresh from every non-voided payment, never stored as a separate flag that could drift out of sync.

Void

The correction path once an invoice is Pending or Paid — for when the whole invoice needs undoing. If only some of the items are coming back and the rest of the sale is staying real, a Sales Return is usually the better fit — it doesn't need Void at all. Voiding requires a reason, and the invoice stays fully visible on record afterward — marked Void, never silently deleted. An invoice with an active payment or an active Sales Return against it can't be voided directly; void those first. A Paid invoice always has at least one active payment, so in practice that means: void the payment (this drops it back to Pending), then void the invoice. Only a still-Draft invoice can ever be deleted outright.

The one-way path

Draft → Pending → Paid, with Void reachable from Draft or Pending as an off-ramp at any point. There's no going backward except through that recalculation-from-payments behavior in Paid → Pending — everything else is one direction, by design, so the history an invoice leaves behind is always honest about what actually happened to it.

See How to create an invoice for the full walkthrough from Draft to getting paid.

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