How to Cancel an E-Invoice: Issue a Credit Note (Type 381)

Short answer: you cannot cancel a Peppol e-invoice. Once the receiving Access Point has accepted the document, there is no recall, no delete and no undo. You cancel it economically by issuing a credit note (UBL CreditNote, UNTDID 1001 code 381) that references the original invoice number in cac:BillingReference and reverses the amounts. If you still need to bill the customer, you send a new invoice afterwards with a new number. The 24-hour cancellation window you may have read about belongs to India's GST system and does not exist in Peppol or the EU.

1. Can you cancel an e-invoice?

It depends on which e-invoicing system you are in, and the two answers you find online contradict each other for a reason.

In Peppol, used across the EU plus Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, the answer is no. Once your Access Point has handed the document to the recipient's Access Point over AS4, there is no mechanism to recall, retract or delete it. The document has been delivered. The recipient may have already booked it.

In India's GST e-invoicing system the answer is yes, within 24 hours, through the Invoice Registration Portal (IRP). In Malaysia's MyInvois the window is 72 hours. Most search results for "how to cancel an e-invoice" describe one of those two portals. If you invoice from Belgium or anywhere else in the EU, none of those steps apply to you.

2. Why a sent e-invoice cannot be recalled

A paper invoice lives in an envelope. Catch the mistake before you post it and you tear it up. E-invoices behave differently, for three structural reasons.

3. The credit note, and the UNTDID 1001 codes around it

A credit note is a document issued by the seller that reduces or fully reverses a previously issued invoice. It is the formal, legally recognised way to correct or cancel an invoice in nearly every VAT system.

In UBL a credit note is a different root element from an invoice. You send a CreditNote document, not an Invoice document, and the type code sits in cbc:CreditNoteTypeCode instead of cbc:InvoiceTypeCode. That distinction trips up a lot of first integrations.

UNTDID 1001 codes you actually need

EN 16931 field BT-3 carries the document type code from the UNTDID 1001 code list. The full list has hundreds of entries. Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 accepts only a subset, and these are the ones that come up in practice.

Codes outside the Peppol subset will fail schematron validation at your Access Point rather than at the receiver, which is the cheaper place to find out. Validate before you send.

Full vs partial credit notes

A full credit note reverses the entire original invoice. Every line, the full net amount and the full VAT are credited back. That is what you send when you want the invoice to effectively disappear from the customer's ledger.

A partial credit note reverses only part of it. Use it when one line was wrong, a quantity was overstated, or you agreed a discount after the fact. EN 16931 supports both. The rule of thumb: credit fully when the invoice itself is wrong (wrong buyer, wrong VAT number, wrong VAT rate), credit partly when only the commercial content changed.

Mandatory fields per EN 16931

A valid credit note under Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 must include:

4. How to reference the original invoice (BillingReference)

This is the field most people are looking for when they search for how to cancel an e-invoice. The link between a credit note and the invoice it reverses is EN 16931 group BG-3, "Preceding Invoice Reference". It holds BT-25, the original invoice number, and optionally BT-26, the original issue date.

In UBL that maps to this path:

cac:BillingReference/cac:InvoiceDocumentReference/cbc:ID        -> BT-25
cac:BillingReference/cac:InvoiceDocumentReference/cbc:IssueDate -> BT-26

A minimal, valid Peppol credit note that cancels invoice INV-2026-042 looks like this:

<CreditNote
  xmlns="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:CreditNote-2"
  xmlns:cac="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:CommonAggregateComponents-2"
  xmlns:cbc="urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:CommonBasicComponents-2">

  <cbc:CustomizationID>urn:cen.eu:en16931:2017#compliant#urn:fdc:peppol.eu:2017:poacc:billing:3.0</cbc:CustomizationID>
  <cbc:ProfileID>urn:fdc:peppol.eu:2017:poacc:billing:01:1.0</cbc:ProfileID>

  <cbc:ID>CN-2026-001</cbc:ID>
  <cbc:IssueDate>2026-09-09</cbc:IssueDate>
  <cbc:CreditNoteTypeCode>381</cbc:CreditNoteTypeCode>
  <cbc:Note>Credit note reversing invoice INV-2026-042 in full.</cbc:Note>
  <cbc:DocumentCurrencyCode>EUR</cbc:DocumentCurrencyCode>

  <!-- BG-3: the invoice this credit note reverses -->
  <cac:BillingReference>
    <cac:InvoiceDocumentReference>
      <cbc:ID>INV-2026-042</cbc:ID>
      <cbc:IssueDate>2026-06-11</cbc:IssueDate>
    </cac:InvoiceDocumentReference>
  </cac:BillingReference>

  <!-- seller, buyer, tax totals and lines follow, mirroring the original -->
</CreditNote>

One practical warning. Base Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 does not make BG-3 mandatory, so a credit note without it will pass validation and be delivered. It will still cause a problem, because the recipient's accounting software has nothing to match it against and the credit lands unallocated. Always fill it in.

5. What Belgian VAT rules add on top of EN 16931

Passing Peppol validation is not the same as being compliant. Schematron checks the standard. It does not check your national VAT code. In Belgium a corrective document has two extra requirements.

The wording, in Dutch and French:

NL: BTW terug te storten aan de Staat in de mate waarin ze
    oorspronkelijk in aftrek werd gebracht.

FR: TVA a reverser a l'Etat dans la mesure ou elle a ete
    initialement deduite.

Put it in cbc:Note (BT-22) on the credit note. No Peppol validator will warn you if it is missing, and a VAT audit is a late moment to find out. If you are unsure whether the statement applies to a specific correction, ask your accountant. It hinges on whether the customer originally deducted the VAT.

6. Step-by-step: issue a credit note on e-invoice.be

There are two routes. Use the JSON document model if you are building from scratch. Post the UBL directly if your ERP already produces valid XML, or if you need full control over BG-3.

Route A: the JSON document model

Create the document with document_type set to CREDIT_NOTE. The JSON model has no dedicated billing-reference field, so carry the original invoice number in note, together with the Belgian VAT statement.

POST https://api.e-invoice.be/api/documents/
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "document_type": "CREDIT_NOTE",
  "invoice_id": "CN-2026-001",
  "invoice_date": "2026-09-09",
  "note": "Credit note reversing invoice INV-2026-042 of 2026-06-11 in full. BTW terug te storten aan de Staat in de mate waarin ze oorspronkelijk in aftrek werd gebracht.",
  "vendor_name": "Your Company BV",
  "vendor_tax_id": "BE0123456789",
  "vendor_address": "Kerkstraat 1, 1000 Brussels, BE",
  "customer_name": "Client NV",
  "customer_tax_id": "BE0987654321",
  "customer_peppol_id": "0208:0987654321",
  "currency": "EUR",
  "items": [
    {
      "description": "Consulting services (full reversal of INV-2026-042)",
      "quantity": 10,
      "unit_price": 150.00,
      "tax_rate": 21.00
    }
  ]
}

Route B: post your own UBL CreditNote

If you need a real structured cac:BillingReference in the XML, build the CreditNote yourself and upload it. The endpoint takes a multipart file. Validate it first so you see any schematron issue before the document is created.

# 1. Validate against Peppol BIS Billing 3.0
curl -X POST https://api.e-invoice.be/api/validate/ubl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -F "file=@credit-note.xml"

# 2. Create the document from the UBL
curl -X POST https://api.e-invoice.be/api/documents/ubl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -F "file=@credit-note.xml"

Send it over Peppol

Both routes end the same way. Send the created document to the same recipient that received the original invoice.

POST https://api.e-invoice.be/api/documents/{document_id}/send
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY

// Response
{
  "id": "doc-cn-abc123",
  "state": "SENT",
  "document_type": "CREDIT_NOTE",
  "invoice_id": "CN-2026-001",
  "customer_name": "Client NV",
  "created_at": "2026-09-09T14:30:00Z"
}

You can pull the generated XML back with GET /api/documents/{document_id}/ubl to confirm exactly what left the building. On the receiving side, GET /api/inbox/credit-notes lists the credit notes your suppliers sent you.

Still need to bill the customer? Create a second document with document_type: "INVOICE" and a fresh, unique invoice_id. See our API documentation for the full reference, or read the API integration guide.

7. How to cancel a credit note you sent by mistake

A credit note is a Peppol document like any other. It cannot be recalled either. Crediting the wrong invoice, or crediting twice, is a common mistake and there are two ways out.

Whichever you pick, tell the customer before you send. Three documents arriving for one transaction without an explanation will generate a dispute, not a payment.

8. Cancellation rules by country

Different countries run different e-invoicing systems with different cancellation rules. This is why search results contradict each other.

The pattern is clear. Mature e-invoicing systems converge on the credit note as the correction mechanism. The systems that allow direct cancellation restrict it to a short window and still fall back to a credit note afterwards.

9. Credit note vs cancellation vs amendment vs void

These four words are used interchangeably in accounting software and they mean different things in e-invoicing. Here is what each one maps to in Peppol.

The takeaway: in Peppol the credit note is the only correction mechanism that changes what the customer owes. Whether your software calls it cancelling, voiding or amending, the wire format answer is the same.

10. Common mistakes when correcting e-invoices

11. Frequently asked questions