Lesson 7 — Immutability, the archive, and who may do what
The last lesson is about what you cannot do, which is the part that makes everything before it worth anything.
The obligation. A transmitted tax document is a record. A record that can be quietly edited afterwards is not evidence of anything, and a system that allows it cannot support the invoice it produced. So the software takes the ability away, from everybody, at the moment of transmission.
The mental model. A transmitted e-invoice is SHA-256 stamped and immutable. It cannot be re-generated and it cannot be reset to draft. The hash is what turns "here is our copy of the XML" into "here is the file we sent, and here is the proof it has not moved since". Use View XML to download the archived, hash-stamped file whenever you need to produce it.
Reset to Draft is a Manager action, and not one that survives transmission. Only a Manager can reset a document to draft, and not after it has been transmitted. So when a customer asks for a change to an invoice that has already gone, the answer is not an edit. It is a credit note, and then a corrected invoice — each of which is itself a posted customer document in AED to an in-scope partner, and therefore becomes its own e-invoice with its own hash. The correction is visible as a correction, which is the point.
Who may do what. The module defines a UAE E-Invoicing privilege with two groups, and the split is deliberate rather than incidental.
| Action | User | Manager |
|---|---|---|
| Create, generate, validate, send and retry documents | Yes | Yes |
| Read ASP accounts | Yes | Yes |
| Manage ASP accounts | No | Yes |
| See and edit the secret credentials | No | Yes |
| Delete e-invoice documents | No | Yes |
| Reset to Draft, before transmission | No | Yes |
Missing menus are a group, not a bug. If the ASP Accounts or E-Invoice Documents menus are not there, or the credential fields are simply absent from an ASP account you can otherwise read, the user is not in the right group. Ask an administrator for UAE E-Invoicing → User, or Manager where managing accounts and holding the secrets is genuinely part of the job. Documents and ASP accounts are also scoped per company by record rules, so in a multi-company database a user sees their own company's records and not the group's.
The worked example. Invoice INV/2026/00187 was transmitted on the Tuesday morning. On Tuesday afternoon the customer calls: the ironmongery line should have been 10 sets, not 12. Nobody at Marina Ridge can put that invoice back to draft, and the buttons that would do it are correctly absent. So the clerk raises a credit note in AED for the difference — 2 sets at AED 875.00, so AED 1,750.00 plus VAT of AED 87.50, a credit of AED 1,837.50 — posts it, presses Send & Print, and the credit note becomes its own PINT AE document with its own hash and its own place in the trail.
The failure mode. Two versions of the same misunderstanding. One is a user hunting for a Reset to Draft button that is correctly absent and concluding the module is broken. The other is a manager who has used Reset to Draft successfully on an untransmitted document and assumes the same is available afterwards. The governing fact is the transmission, not the group: before it, a Manager can reset; after it, nobody can, and that is the guarantee the archive rests on.