Why receipts are voided, not deleted
Every receipt you generate takes the next number from your receipt sequence, and that number is spent the moment it is assigned. A charity has to be able to account for its whole numbering — including numbers that were spoiled — so a receipt you decide not to use has to stay on record as voided rather than disappear. An unexplained gap in the sequence is exactly what an auditor will ask about.
That is what voiding does: it takes the receipt out of your working list, and keeps the number accounted for.
Voiding a receipt
You can void a receipt from its detail page, or void several at once from the receipts list using the row checkboxes and the bulk Void action. Both ask for confirmation first, so a misclick doesn’t void anything.
Only receipts that haven’t been issued can be voided. Once a receipt has been emailed to a donor or marked as mailed, it’s a document in someone else’s hands — use Cancel & Replace instead, which issues a corrected receipt and keeps the trail between the two.
Restoring
Voided receipts live in the Voided view, a sub-tab on the receipt history page alongside your active receipts. From there you can:
- Restore a single receipt with Restore Receipt, which returns it to your normal list under its original number.
- Select several with the checkboxes and use bulk Restore to bring them back at once.
Restoring is there for the case where you voided something by mistake. It’s non-destructive and can be repeated any number of times without losing data.
What voiding does not do
Voiding never destroys the receipt record, and there is no step that does. Receipts are permanent once generated: the record and its history stay in the system, and its number is never reissued. If you need a copy of everything for your own files, use the data export in Settings → Data & Privacy, which includes your receipt records and their PDFs.
The PDF file itself is a separate matter. On the free plan PDFs expire after 30 days to save storage, while the receipt records are kept indefinitely; an expired PDF can be regenerated for one credit. Retention skips voided receipts: a voided receipt’s PDF does not expire while it stays voided. If you restore the receipt, its PDF expires 30 days after it was generated, as for any other receipt.
Related
- Correcting an Issued Receipt (Cancel & Replace) — for fixing a mistake on a receipt the donor already has