# Fishbowl: "Work Order is fulfilled and cannot be voided" — why

> The work order has reached Fulfilled status, so finished goods have already been received into stock and raw materials consumed, and voiding would have to unwind committed inventory transactions.

## What triggers it

You tried to void a work order that is in **Fulfilled** status. Fulfilled means the manufacture step already finished: the finished good was received into stock and the raw materials (or subassemblies) it required were pulled out of stock and consumed. The dialog appears the moment you attempt the void on a work order that has crossed into that state, not before.

## Why Fishbowl blocks it

A void is meant to cancel something that has not happened yet. By the time a work order is fulfilled, it has already moved inventory in two directions at once: quantity added for the finished good, quantity removed for every component, each at a specific cost. Those movements set your on-hand counts and feed the cost layers behind your inventory valuation. Letting you void at this point would force Fishbowl to silently unwind all of that, which can leave negative on-hand, orphaned cost, or a valuation that no longer ties to any transaction. Blocking the void keeps the completed activity as a real, dated record rather than something that quietly disappears.

## What to do

Correct it forward instead of erasing it. Reverse the finished-good receipt with an inventory adjustment that removes the quantity you should not have made, and add back the raw materials that were consumed, at the same costs. If the real issue is cost rather than quantity, handle it as a costing correction. This is a reconciliation, not a one-click undo: you are recording the offset explicitly so the audit trail shows both the original build and its reversal.

## If it is already reconciled or exported

If the fulfillment already posted to QuickBooks or Xero, the void was never going to clean that up for you. Post a matching adjusting entry on the accounting side for the same period and amounts, and confirm the finished-good and component values agree between Fishbowl and your ledger. Reversing only in Fishbowl is the classic way inventory and books drift apart.

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*From Israel Lopez Consulting (ILC). Custom Fishbowl Inventory integrations and software, and Fishbowl experts since 2015. Written by Israel Lopez. Questions about this topic, or want to reach the people who wrote it? Visit https://israellopezconsulting.com/contact*