Voiding, trashing and deleting

Work gets cancelled, scopes change, and orders get raised by mistake. Those are two different problems, and SmarteBuild now treats them as two different actions.

Void cancels an order the supplier already has. Trash clears away one that never went anywhere.

Which one you want

The question to ask is has anybody outside the office seen this order?

	Void	Trash
For	An order already sent	A mistake, a duplicate, an abandoned draft
The order stays in the list	Yes, marked Voided	No — it moves to the bin
Committed cost released	Yes	Yes
The supplier can be told	Yes	Yes
Undo	Un-void	Restore

Both offer to email the supplier, and both are reversible. Neither destroys anything.

Void only appears on an order that has been sent

On an unsent order there is nothing to cancel and nobody to tell, so the button is not offered — Trash is the honest action for a draft that is not going ahead.

Voiding

Void on the order’s toolbar. You are asked for:

• A reason — why it is being cancelled.
• Whether to notify the supplier.

The order stays in the list carrying a Voided badge, which outranks its workflow status: a cancelled order does not go on reading as Sent.

Write the reason for someone reading it in a year, not for yourself today. “Scope moved to Order 2026-041-14 after client changed the roof” is useful. “Not needed” is not.

Notifying the supplier

Do notify, for anything already sent. A supplier who is not told is entitled to deliver against the order they hold, and the argument about who pays for the concrete on the truck is one you will lose more often than you win.

The offer only appears when there is somebody worth telling — the order actually reached them, and their contact has an email address. You will not be asked about a draft that never went out.

The only time to skip notification is when you have already spoken to them and the void is a formality catching the system up with a conversation.

Un-voiding

Un-void reverses it, and the committed cost comes back with it.

Un-voiding does not tell the supplier

The cancellation email has already gone. As far as the supplier is concerned the order is dead until you tell them otherwise — so ring them, or send the order again with a note saying it is back on.

Trashing

Trash moves the order to the bin. Use it for an order raised against the wrong costing, a duplicate, or a draft for work that never started.

It is reversible — Restore brings it back exactly as it was.

Finding a trashed order

Trashed orders are hidden from the list. Tick trashed beside the status filter to show them, and an order in the bin is labelled as such when you open it.

That tick is the answer to “where has that order gone?”, which is otherwise a genuinely puzzling few minutes.

Trashing also offers the supplier notice, on the same rule as voiding: only when the order actually reached someone. In practice you will rarely see it here, because an order worth trashing is usually one nobody outside the office saw.

Deleting permanently

Delete permanently appears only on an order already in the bin. It is the one action on this page that cannot be undone.

Two things stop it:

• The order must be in the trash first. There is no single step from a live order to gone.
• An order with invoices against it cannot be deleted at all. The refusal is deliberate — deleting it would leave expenses pointing at an order that no longer exists, and nothing would reconcile.

Never permanently delete an order the supplier has seen

If a supplier holds a copy of an order that no longer exists in your system, you have no record of what you asked for or when you cancelled it. That is the position you do not want to be in when an invoice arrives against it. Void it, or leave it in the bin.

What happens to the committed cost

Voiding and trashing both release the committed cost back. The items return to being allowed-but-not-committed, and the % Cost on those items drops accordingly.

That is what makes both safe from a cost-tracking point of view: your committed total goes back to reflecting reality, and the cancelled order does not sit there inflating it.

If an invoice already exists

An order that has been invoiced against is a different problem. Voiding it leaves an expense pointing at a cancelled order, which will not reconcile — and permanent deletion is refused outright.

Deal with the invoice first — credit it, or have the supplier reissue — and then void the order. If part of the work was done and invoiced legitimately, the cleaner approach is usually to revise the order down to what was actually supplied rather than voiding it at all.

Worked example

The Hendricks client changes from a tiled roof to colorbond after the tile order has gone out.

1. Open the tile order.
2. Void, reason: “Client changed roof to colorbond, 28/09. Replaced by order 2026-041-19.”
3. Notify the supplier — ticked.
4. Raise the new order against the colorbond items.
5. Raise a variation for the cost difference to the client.

Step five is the one people forget. Voiding an order fixes your committed cost; it does not tell the client the job has changed price.