Status: rejected invoice

When an invoice is rejected by both parties, it is legally considered as having never existed. From an accounting perspective, it is therefore not treated as a cancelled invoice, but as an invoice not issued and not received.

Key principle: no invoice means no accounting entry.

As long as the invoice is rejected, it is not legally validated, it must not enter the accounting records, and it generates neither VAT nor revenue. This is referred to as a rejection before accounting recognition.

On the supplier (issuer) side, two situations are possible. In the normal and most common case, the invoice is rejected on the platform (price error, VAT error, wrong customer, etc.). The invoice is then cancelled in the billing system, it must not be recorded in accounting, and it must not be definitively numbered. In practice, it is either deleted or kept as a rejected draft. From an accounting standpoint, no entry is recorded.

Regarding numbering, this is a very important point: if the invoice had already been assigned a number, that number must never be deleted. The rejection must be kept as an audit trail to ensure the continuity of the numbering, but without any accounting entry being posted.

On the customer (recipient) side, the logic is the same. A rejected invoice is not a liability, not an expense, and does not give any right to VAT deduction. It must therefore never be recorded in accounting. It is simply a rejected document in the workflow.

This situation must be clearly distinguished from a credit note. If an invoice has been accepted and then cancelled, a credit note is mandatory. If the invoice is rejected before validation, no accounting action is required. The rejection replaces the credit note, which is one of the objectives of the electronic invoicing reform.

In the electronic invoicing lifecycle (PDP or PPF), the usual statuses are submitted, rejected, and accepted. A rejected invoice exits the lifecycle, does not enter accounting, and can be reissued after correction. This is often referred to as a business rejection.

In summary, an invoice rejected by both parties does not exist from an accounting perspective, generates no accounting entry, does not require a credit note, and can be reissued after correction. It is considered as if it had never been issued.