Credit notes and refunds

What object reduces an invoice, and what returns the cash? Every negative document is a distinct object with its own numbering, stored with positive amounts, and reconciled separately by the finance team. Merging them into a signed invoice column destroys the audit path.

Concepts: 8
Divergences: 2
Structural: 0

Endpoints

Xero

GET /CreditNotes

Type: ACCRECCREDIT or ACCPAYCREDIT

QBO

SELECT * FROM CreditMemo / VendorCredit

Two entities

NetSuite

creditmemo / vendorcredit

Two record types

The same concept in three vocabularies

Read across a row. Where a cell is absent, the concept has nowhere to live in that system — which is a design constraint, not a gap to paper over.

Native: — A field or object exists for it
Partial: — Exists with a caveat that changes what you can build
Derived: — Not stored — you compute it
Absent: — Nothing in the API

Credit notes and refunds fields compared across Xero, QuickBooks Online and NetSuite
Concept	Xero	QBO	NetSuite
Reduce a customer invoice	CreditNote, Type: ACCRECCREDIT	CreditMemo	creditmemo
Reduce a vendor bill	CreditNote, Type: ACCPAYCREDIT	VendorCredit	vendorcredit
Cash back to a customer	Payment against the ACCRECCREDIT A refund is a Payment against the credit note itself; allocation to an invoice is a separate Allocations call	RefundReceipt A separate entity again	customerrefund
Cash back from a vendor	Payment against the ACCPAYCREDIT	Deposit linked to the VendorCredit Two objects for one event	vendorpayment / deposit
Cash sale with no receivable	BankTransaction, Type: RECEIVE	SalesReceipt	cashsale
Allocation to a document	Allocations[] on the credit note	LinkedTxn on the invoice or a Payment line	apply sublist
Sign convention	Positive	Positive	Positive
Remaining credit	RemainingCredit	Balance Unapplied portion	amountremaining

What actually differs, and what you do about it

A difference stated without a response is trivia. Each of these carries the handling.

Sharp edge

Refunds are a third object, not a mode of the credit note

Xero · QBO · NetSuite

Reducing a receivable and returning cash are separate events with separate documents in all three systems, and QuickBooks needs two objects (VendorCredit plus Deposit) to express a vendor refund at all. A UI that treats 'credit' and 'refund' as one action will produce the wrong pair of records.

Do — Model the credit and the cash movement as two linked records, and make the UI ask which one the user means before it writes anything.

Sharp edge

Sign flipping is a one-place decision

Xero · QBO · NetSuite

All three store positive amounts and encode direction in the type. If normalisation flips signs for display or for aggregation, doing it in two places produces a double negation that reads as a plausible number and survives review.

Do — Flip once, at the boundary between the canonical model and the presentation layer, and test the round trip. The ledger table renders debit and credit as two columns, never one signed column.

The type the components consume

credit-notes.ts

/* Credit notes reuse LedgerDocument with a distinct type. The amounts stay
   positive; the type carries the direction; the statement layer decides sign. */
type CreditNote = LedgerDocument & {
  type: "sales_credit" | "purchase_credit";
  remaining: Money;              // unallocated portion
  allocations: Allocation[];     // documents this credit has been applied to
  refund?: { paymentId: string; amount: Money };
};

What this changes in the interface

The payoff. Every difference above that reaches the surface, and what the component does about it.

Credit notes have their own number sequence: They appear as their own document type in every list, with their own number column. Never as a negative row in the invoice list.
A credit and its refund are two records: The document detail shows both, linked, with the cash movement separately dated — because they often are.

Where the accounting is explained

What consumes this payload

The normalised object above is what the components read. These are the surfaces it feeds, the words for the concepts in it, and the document that explains the accounting.

Compared acrossXero docs QuickBooks Online docs NetSuite docs