It is not a real invoice. You can ignore it for accounting purposes.
Advisory invoices are reminders of outstanding amounts that need to be paid. Typically they are used for paying off your entire account when you have an outstanding balance. (In this respect it is similar to a monthly credit card statement reminding you what you owe, rather than a new charge.) Since it is only advising you of money that is already owed from other purchases, the invoice is otherwise ignored by your financial reports.
Don't do it!
Your invoices and payments should be left in their original state as much as possible to ensure that they describe the actual financial transactions that occurred, and they match the invoices and receipts that were sent out. This is an important part of your audit trail.
If you need to refund part of a purchase, that is usually a separate transaction from the original sale. See below for instructions.
If you just made a mistake on a new invoice, and you have not received any payments yet, then you can use the Point of Sale module to re-open the sale, and make the changes. Do not do this if you have already received payments, as it will mess up your accounting history.
You cannot delete financial data, as that would complicate your financial audit trail. Find the invoice in the Payments module. If there are no payments on the invoice, simply change its status to "canceled".
If payments were actually received, you should consider doing a refund instead. See below.
You cannot delete financial data, as that would complicate your financial audit trail. But you can cancel erroneous payments - click on the payment status (usually "paid" for valid payments), and change it's status to canceled. You can optionally include a note explaining the change.
You cannot edit payment amounts, as that would complicate your financial audit trail. Instead, just cancel the erroneous payment (see previous question), and then add a new payment with the corrected amount.
Use the Point of Sale module to manually create invoices. The help has detailed instructions.
Note that you can find accounts receivable using the Payments module.
If there is a single invoice owing, the simplest thing to do is re-send the invoice. Find the invoice, and click on the "Email invoice" tool. You can customize the subject line, introductory message, and signature.
If there are multiple owing, or an overall account balance owing that doesn't neatly correspond to a single invoice, you can email the account statement instead: look up the account, and click on the "email" tool.
If your customer is a member of your organization, they can optionally pay for old invoices by e-commerce by logging into their profile and clicking on the "My Account" function.
Note that refunds have two parts: (1) your bookkeeping that describes the refunded purchase, and (2) the actual payment back to the purchaser.
For the bookkeeping part:
Find the invoice in the Payments module. Click on the Cancellation/refund tool. Use either the Manual Refund or Automatic Refund option.
For the reversed payment:
If you use an integrated payment processor like Stripe, you can use its tool to automatically issue the payment back to the cardholder. Otherwise you have to make the payment manually. Note that the Automatic Refund option in the Payments module will automatically take you to the payment reversal function once it has completed the bookkeeping.
To refund particular line items:
Find the invoice in the Payments module. Click on the Cancellation/refund tool. Use the Manual Refund option. Select only the line items that should be refunded. Include taxes for those items as well. You can optionally charge an admin fee, which reduces the amount of the refund.
If you have a partial refund that does not correspond to particular line items, then you have to build a custom refund. Use the Point of Sale tool, and look up the invoice that needs to be refunded. Click "Refund all or part of this sale". That builds a refund invoice that describes your refund. By default it is set up to issue a full refund, but you can edit in any way, including by adding line items, removing line items, and changing the amounts or descriptions of line items. To reduce the amount of the refund by adding an admin fee, add a line item called "Admin Fee" and give it a negative amount.
Note that you have to issue the actual refund payments separately.
You can make the purchase as them, on your website. If they are a member or user, login as them first. (Use the Membership module to find their account, and use the "Login as" feature to assume their identity.)
Do not do it while logged in to your own account, or you will be making the purchase for yourself!
If they are not a member, just a member of the public, you can log out and then make the purchase.
Use the Billing Adjustments module. Click on the Coupon Code tab, and enter the relevant information (description, coupon code, discount, and which type of sale is eligible for this discount).
Note that discounts can be actual dollar amounts (eg. "100.00" for a one hundred dollar discount) or percentages (eg. "25%" for 25 percent off).
If you want to make use of more advanced features, you can edit the coupon code after you create it. You can put time limits on the code, narrow the types of purchases it can be used with, or get fancier with the discount calculations. See the help for more information.
Note that anyone who knows the coupon code can make use of it. If you want to restrict the usage, consider using Gift Cards instead. The Gift Cards module lets you create single-use discounts. You can pre-assign these to customers in a contact list, or you can just generate a bunch of gift cards, and then give out the numbers, which can be used like personal coupon codes. Once the amount on a gift card has been used up, it is gone. Even if gift card numbers are shared, the discount can still only be used once.
For event registrations, it is usually best just to create a special discounted fee, rather than complicate your accounting and tax rules with coupon codes. This is because events follow different tax rules (tax is charged based on the event location, not the purchaser or seller location), and coupon codes will not take those into account.
Yes, as long as the first purchaser does not use the full discount.
Anyone who types in the gift card code can benefit from the balance remaining on the giftcard. For example, if I have a gift card worth $100, and I use it to get a $75 discount, then the gift card has a remaining balance of $25. I can then give the gift card to you, and you can use it the same way to get a $25 discount. But then it is used up; if you give the gift card code to someone else, there is no remaining amount on it.
You can either start over with a new gift card, or you can restore the old giftcard.
To do the latter, look up the old gift card in the Gift Cards module. (Go to Report & Export > all assigned gift cards.) Click the $ button by their gift card, and you can recharge it with a new amount. Since this gift card is already assigned to them, it will be used automatically - no need to enter the number when checking out.Â