Guide

Give money back, on the record.

A credit note is a numbered document that reduces what a client owes. Raise one against an invoice, then either spend it on a receivable or record the cash refund — two separate decisions, both audited, and neither of them a quiet edit to an invoice that has already gone out.

01What a credit note is

It is an invoice in every mechanical sense — the same per-client number sequence, the same PDF pipeline, the same collection — with a negative total and the word Credit note where the header would say Invoice. That is deliberate: your receivables total sums what clients owe without needing to know credit notes exist, so an unapplied credit reduces the outstanding balance immediately and correctly. Credit notes belong to the Finance workspace feature, so they are only available once Finance is enabled for your workspace.

What it is not is a way to correct an invoice. An invoice that has been issued keeps its number, its date and its line items for good; the credit note is the second document that says how much of it you are giving back, which is what an auditor expects to find and what a client can be sent.

Where

Finance
Invoices
open an invoice
Issue credit note

Also reachable from a client file — Clients, open the client, Billing history, then the invoice.

02Raise one against an invoice

Give it a reason and one line per thing you are crediting — a description and an amount each, so the document explains itself six months later. Amounts are positive. You type what you are giving back, which is also how you would say it out loud; the negative is the storage detail and Revvly refuses a negative input rather than flipping it, because a caller that had already negated would otherwise produce a credit note that bills the client.

The ceiling is what the invoice was raised for, less any credit already raised against it, and the form states the headroom up front rather than letting you write out every line and then refusing it. The check in the form is a courtesy — a note raised elsewhere while you were typing moves the ceiling, and the server’s refusal is the one that decides.

Available from

Any issued invoice, paid or not. An over-billed invoice is worth correcting before the client pays it as much as after — the only difference is whether the credit settles the invoice or comes back as cash, and that is decided later, on the note.

Not available from

A credit note (crediting credit is refused) or a held draft, which has no number, no amount and nothing to correct yet.

Currency

Taken from the invoice or the subscription. A mismatch is refused rather than converted — a credit is given back in the currency it was billed in.

03Then decide: spend it, or pay it back

Open the credit note and it offers exactly the two ways a credit leaves the books, for as long as there is any left to spend.

Where

Finance
Invoices
open the credit note
Apply to an invoice

Or Record a refund, alongside it. Both disappear once the note is fully applied or refunded — a spent note is a finished record.

Apply to an invoice

Pick one of the client’s open receivables. Leave the suggested amount alone and Revvly applies the smaller of the credit left and the balance at the moment of the write — not the figure the form read when it opened, which matters because a payment can land against the same invoice while you are looking at it. Type a smaller figure to apply part of the credit.

Record a refund

Records a payment that has already happened. Revvly is not a payment processor: you make the refund in your bank or PSP, and this is the entry that reconciles against it — which is why it asks for a reference and lets you backdate to the day the money actually left. The whole remaining credit goes back; spend part of it first if only part is being refunded.

04The three states, and what each does to your numbers

From issued to spent or refunded

Issued
Receivables net the unapplied credit. No money has moved.
Applied
Settles an open invoice. Collected cash does not move.
or
Refunded
Paid back in cash. Shows in collected cash as a negative.

Issued lowers what the client owes at once; only a refund moves cash.

1
Issued
The note exists as a numbered document with a negative total. Nothing has been settled and no money has moved — but the client already owes less, because accounts receivable nets an unapplied credit against their outstanding balance the moment it is raised.
2
Applied
The credit is spent against one of the client’s open invoices. That invoice takes a real payment entry and can go Paid, because settling a receivable with credit genuinely clears it. Collected cash does not move: credit-sourced settlements are netted back out of every cash figure, so the month does not report money it never banked.
3
Refunded
The credit was paid back in cash instead of spent. The note itself is marked paid on the refund date and appears in collected cash as a negative, which is correct — cash really did leave the business. A refunded note is a finished record and offers no further action.

A credit note is never chased. It carries no due date, it is left out of AR aging, and dunning skips it — the two collection behaviours that would otherwise follow from sharing the invoice document are switched off explicitly.

05Revvly raises some of them for you

Two paths issue a credit note without anyone opening the form, because in both cases the alternative was money quietly disappearing:

A mid-cycle downgrade

Moving a customer to something cheaper part-way through a period computes a negative proration. That is a credit note against the invoice that charged for the period, so the customer can spend it on their next bill. Mid-cycle changes covers the timing choice.

A refundable prepaid term

Cancelling inside a prepaid span whose commitment is Refundable credits the whole periods the customer paid for and will not now consume — of the plan and of the components paid ahead with it. Only invoices that were actually issued count towards it — a cancelled or voided invoice, or one still held as a draft, was never money collected and cannot be refunded. Billing schedules covers the postures.

06The guardrails

A credit cannot exceed the invoice it credits, counting every earlier credit against that invoice.
A credit cannot be spent twice. Two applications of the same note racing each other cannot overspend it — the credit is reserved before the receivable is settled, and the loser of the race changes nothing.
A note cannot be refunded and applied for the same money, in either order. The refund is conditional on the note’s state at the moment of the write, and a refund that has been overtaken is refused with a message saying which of the two happened.
A retry is safe. Applying the same note to the same invoice twice is recognised rather than doubled, on either side of the pair.

07Reading them from an integration

Credit notes live in the same collection as invoices, so they come back from the invoice reads rather than a separate endpoint.

Public GraphQL

A credit note appears in a client’s invoices as a row with a negative amount — that sign is how you tell one apart today. It nets into paymentSummary automatically, and only its unapplied remainder does: a note partly spent has already settled the invoice it was spent on, so counting its face value again would report the client owing less than they do. Credit notes contribute nothing to the receivable counts, because those count invoices the client owes.

MCP / the Assistant

query_invoices marks each row isCreditNote and reports creditRemaining on the ones that are, so “what credit does this client still hold” is one question.