Correcting a Journal Entry Keeps Linked Payments and Invoices in Sync

What it is

Correct Entry is the action you use on a posted journal entry when the amounts, account, or classification need to change. Instead of editing the original entry, URBI voids or reverses it (depending on whether the accounting period is open or closed) and posts a new, corrected journal entry in its place. This preserves a clean audit trail: the original entry is never silently altered.

Correcting an entry now also keeps every record that pointed at the original entry pointed at the correct one. If a payment, invoice, expense, or other linked record referenced the journal entry you corrected, that link is automatically updated to point at the corrected entry once the correction posts.

Why this matters

A journal entry rarely stands alone. A payment, an invoice, an expense, a vendor payment, a bond, a payment plan installment, and several other record types can each carry a direct link back to the journal entry that represents their accounting. When you correct an entry, the entry itself changes identity (a new entry replaces the old one), so anything still pointing at the old entry needs to be updated to point at the new one.

Previously, this update happened for some links but not others. An invoice's entry link would resolve correctly after a correction, but a payment's entry link could be left pointing at the original (now voided or reversed) entry. That could cause the payment's linked-entry view to show stale or missing information, and any calculation that depended on that link to reference the wrong entry.

What happens now

When you correct a posted journal entry:

1. URBI voids the original entry (if the period is still open) or reverses it (if the period is locked or closed).
2. URBI posts the new, corrected journal entry.
3. URBI repoints every linked record, no matter its type, so it now references the corrected entry instead of the original.
4. The correction is recorded in the entry's audit trail, including a summary of exactly which linked records were repointed.

This works the same way whether the entry belongs to an open accounting period or one that has already been locked. On a locked period, the original entry stays in place and remains visible for audit purposes (it is marked as reversed), while the linked record itself now points at the corrected entry going forward.

What this does not change

• Correcting an entry does not recalculate account balances beyond what the correction itself represents. Balances for invoices, payments, and other records are always calculated from the underlying transaction records, so nothing needs to be separately recomputed.
• Correct Entry does not add a new way to correct entries from the invoice or payment screens. You still start a correction from the General Ledger, the same way as before.

Where to find it

Open Accounting > General Ledger, find the posted entry, and choose Correct Entry from its action menu. Any record linked to that entry (visible from its own Linked Journal Entries card) will show the corrected entry once the correction is complete.

See also: Why did my payment look detached after correcting a GL entry?