Q: Why does Bills > Cancel Bills say "Canceled 0 bills" when I choose All Matters or Matter Range?

A: Canceling bills for more than one matter at a time only works when those bills are the most recent bills that were printed for those matters.

The reason is a bit involved. Let's consider an example.

Suppose you print 10 bills with cutoff date 6/30. Then you print 10 bills for the same matters with cutoff date 7/31. Now you want to cancel all 20 of those bills.

You choose Bills > Cancel Bills, All Matters, cutoff 7/31. RTG Bills cancels all 10 bills for 7/31.

Next you want to cancel the 6/30 bills, so you choose Bills > Cancel Bills, All Matters, cutoff 6/30. But now RTG Bills says "Canceled 0 bills". Why?

In this example, the most recent bills are the 7/31 bills. Those could be canceled all at once. But any earlier bills have to be canceled one at a time by choosing One Matter.

Please feel free to skip the following explanation if you are not interested in why this is so.

The reason for this behavior is that RTG Bills stores just one bill number with each matter. It is the number of the most recent bill. If you cancel that bill, RTG Bills doesn't search the database to find the next most recent bill and fill in that number. Instead, it stores a notation that the bill was canceled.

When canceling bills for more than one matter, RTG Bills looks at the stored bill number for each matter. If it is marked canceled, it skips that matter. It does not search for the next bill that has not been canceled.

However, when you ask to cancel a bill for a single matter, if it sees the last one was canceled, it does search for the most recent bill that has not been canceled and RTG Bills cancels it.

So you can always cancel the most recent (not yet canceled) bill for any matter by choosing One Matter.