Void, Credit, Estimate and Plan in the Revenue Cycle

Once charges have become an invoice, the work is no longer about raising money owed — it is about correcting and collecting it. Sometimes an invoice was raised in error and must be cancelled. Sometimes you owe the patient a goodwill adjustment. Sometimes you need to quote a price before any care happens, or let someone pay a large bill in installments. Veona handles all of these on the revenue surface, and it puts the two genuinely destructive actions — voiding an invoice and issuing a credit note — behind your eSign PIN (a personal 6-digit signing code that re-confirms it is really you, the way a signature would). This page walks the full set.

Who / when: the billing manager, after an invoice has been issued — whenever a bill needs reversing, adjusting, quoting up front, or breaking into installments. Some legs (estimates, statements, taking an installment) are also open to the cashier and billing clerk; the privileged reversals (void and credit note) are the billing manager’s alone. Key terms: a charge is one billable line raised by a clinical event; an invoice is a grouped, priced set of charges; a credit note is a formal reversal that reduces an already-issued invoice; a statement is a dated summary of what a patient owes; an estimate is a price quote before care; a payment plan splits a balance into scheduled installments; an eSign PIN is your personal 6-digit signing code. We’ll follow Femi, a billing manager.

1. Billing manager — to cancel an invoice raised in error, open Bill → Overview, find the invoice, and click the row to open its detail screen (invoice detail is reached by row-click, not from a menu tab). On the detail screen, click “Void invoice”.
2. Billing manager — in the “Void invoice” dialog, type a reason (for example, “Duplicate invoice raised in error”), then enter your 6-digit eSign PIN in the PIN boxes and confirm with “Void invoice”. The invoice flips to the Voided state and stays there — voiding is permanent and fully audited.

Caution

A wrong eSign PIN is rejected outright — the void does not go through. The PIN is a true re-authentication, not a formality, so a void can only ever be signed by the person whose PIN it is. The same gate guards the credit note below.

3. Billing manager — to reduce an invoice you do not want to cancel entirely (a partial refund of value, a negotiated discount, a goodwill gesture), open Bill → Credit Notes. Create a credit note against the target invoice, give the reason, and confirm with your eSign PIN. The credit note is issued and its branded PDF is available to download and share.
4. Billing manager — to send a patient a summary of what they owe, open Bill → Statements and run a statement for the patient. Veona produces a dated, branded statement PDF that you can hand over or send — it gathers their outstanding balance into one document.
5. Billing manager — to quote a price before any care happens (a self-pay patient asking “what will this cost?”), open Bill → Estimates and build an estimate from the intended services and the applicable scheme pricing. The patient gets a clear quote with no charges raised yet.
6. Billing manager — when the patient agrees and the care goes ahead, accept the estimate from the same Bill → Estimates screen. Accepting converts the quote into a real invoice — the quoted lines become billable charges on an invoice, so you never re-key what you already quoted.
7. Billing manager — to let a patient settle a large balance over time, open Bill → Payment Plans and create a plan against the invoice, splitting the balance into scheduled installments. From then on, a cashier or clerk can take each installment as it falls due on Bill → Cashier or Bill → Payments, and every payment decrements the outstanding balance.

Tip

Reach for the right tool for the situation. Void when the invoice should never have existed. Credit note when the invoice was valid but its amount must come down. Estimate to quote before care; payment plan to spread the cost after. Mixing these up is the most common revenue-cycle error — voiding a valid invoice loses its audit story, where a credit note preserves it.

Note

Both the void and the credit note are eSign-gated precisely because they move money in the patient’s favour and erase or reduce a record. Everything they touch is written to the tamper-evident audit trail with your identity attached — see Keep a Tamper-Evident Audit Trail of Patient-Data Actions.

What happens next

The invoice is now in the right shape: cancelled, reduced, quoted, or set up for installments. Voided invoices drop out of the patient’s outstanding balance; credit notes reduce it; an accepted estimate becomes a fresh invoice that re-enters the ordinary cycle; a payment plan keeps the balance live but collectable in pieces. Routine collection of co-pays, cash and card, plus deposits and refunds, continues on the cashier desk — see Take a Payment, Deposit or Refund. Where a patient has insurance, the covered portion of an invoice goes on to the payer as a claim.

Follow the trail

• Previous: Turn Charges Into a Scheme-Priced Invoice
• Related: Turn Charges Into a Scheme-Priced Invoice · Run the Payer Claims Lifecycle End to End · Take a Payment, Deposit or Refund · Sign and Amend Any Record With Your eSign PIN