This proposal is damaged or no longer approved and cannot be billed" in Sage 50
Sage 50 is refusing to bill a proposal because its approval status is broken or the record itself is damaged, not because of anything you did.
You are trying to turn a proposal into an invoice, and Sage 50 has stopped you with:
This proposal is damaged or no longer approved and cannot be billed.
In plain language, Sage 50 cannot confirm that the proposal is still valid. Every proposal carries an approval state, and billing checks that state before it creates an invoice. When the check fails, Sage 50 does not tell you which half of the problem it hit. The record may be genuinely damaged, or its approval flag may have been cleared, and the message reads the same either way.
What the message actually means
The wording covers two separate conditions. “No longer approved” is the ordinary case: someone withdrew or edited the approval after the proposal was issued, and Sage 50 will not bill an unapproved document. That is a workflow block, not data damage.
“Damaged” is the other case, and it is rarer. The proposal record inside the company file is internally inconsistent, so the billing routine cannot read it cleanly. Here the message is misleading, because nothing about the approval is wrong. The record itself is the problem.
Check the approval first
Open the proposal from the list and look at its current status. If it shows as unapproved, draft, or expired, the block is working as designed. Re-approve the proposal if it is still valid, or issue a fresh one if it is not, then bill again.
Also check whether the proposal was edited after approval. Some edits invalidate the approval on purpose, so a small change made last week can explain today’s refusal.
When it points to real damage
If the proposal shows as approved and still will not bill, the record is likely damaged. You may also see related symptoms: the proposal list loads slowly, totals look wrong, or the program hesitates when you open the record. Those signs together usually mean damage inside the company data rather than a status problem.
Do not keep retrying the billing. Repeated attempts on a damaged record rarely fix anything and can make recovery harder. Restore your most recent backup and test whether the proposal bills from the restored copy. If it does, the damage is recent and the backup is your cleanest way out.
If the damage is in the file itself
When the same proposals fail across a restored backup, or other records start misbehaving too, the company file needs professional attention. Our engineers repair damaged Sage 50 and Simply Accounting databases, including records that fail exactly this kind of internal check. See our Sage 50 database repair service for what that involves.
If you were already planning a move, a conversion from Sage 50 to QuickBooks can often carry your good data across while leaving the damaged records behind. Whether that works depends on the file, so we evaluate before promising anything.
A useful next step
Send us the file for a free evaluation. We will tell you whether the proposal record can be repaired in place, whether the approval flag can be restored, and what either path involves, before you commit to anything.