The key thing to understand is that a sale’s purpose is to manage the selling process and one part of this is to create the invoices and shipments at the right time.
Whenever the sale is processed (which is triggered automatically by various actions on things related to the sale, but can also be done manually by pressing the Process
button on the sale) the sale will look to see what invoices, or shipments need creating. This means that if you delete a sale’s invoice or shipment, then when the sale is next processed it looks like that invoice or shipment doesn’t exist, so the sale creates it, which causes:
To get round this you should cancel the invoice or shipment. Then as it is still there it won’t get recreated.
However, if you cancel an invoice or shipment the sale doesn’t know whether you’ve done this because you no longer want to invoice or ship it, or because there was a problem and you now need the invoice or shipment recreating.
So the sale’s invoice or shipment state goes into an Exception
state, until you tell it which of these two things you want it to do. This is what the Handle ... Exception
buttons are for.
One important thing to be aware of is that when you click on these buttons all the items to recreate are already selected by default, so you must deselect them if you don’t want them recreating.
So, if it was just the invoice that you wanted to cancel you should have been able to do that by:
- cancelling the invoice
- on the sale clicking on the
Handle Invoice Exception
button
- deselecting the invoice (you may have to hold down Ctrl when clicking on it depending on what client / os you are using)
- clicking on the
OK
button to finish handling the invoice exception.
However if it was the entire sale you wanted to cancel, then you would also have needed to cancel the shipment too.
So, if you don’t want to invoice or ship sale 52 or 67 and you want them to become done you will need to:
- cancel all the outstanding invoices and shipments for both sales
- on each sale handle the invoice and shipment exceptions, making sure that you deselect the items to recreate when running the wizards - so they don’t get recreated.
You should then find that both sales move into the done state.