Yes. The way you put it, it seems like it’s a bad thing and you might have a point but I don’t know whether this is something that should changed especially since there’s an idea to lock the reference field, in that case that wouldn’t be a problem, but that’s up for discussion.
This has many separate but interrelated issues:
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Manager completely ignores text strings in references. Sure you can manually write “ABC-001-D” but the next number is going to be “2”. To my understanding, Manager used to have alpha numeric references but it was simplified to make life easier on most users. However, you can achieve add a fixed text prefix/suffix using custom themes and you can also make it dynamic by introducing custom fields. You can also make it searchable by showing the custom field as column.
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Manager doesn’t automatically enforce multiple sequences for a single field. Maybe @lubos can achieve this, but the real question is should he? To me at least, it seems like the referencing should correspond closely to the data structure that you have. In other software, you are allowed to create multiple receipt voucher types, but in manager, there’s only one object called receipts.
But what if you have another data structure outside of Manager? In that case I suggest copying of whatever external reference into a custom field and you don’t need manager to enforce anything here. -
As @eko touched on, several other software allow custom sequences, however, I cannot compare Dynamics 365 with Manager since Dynamic costs US$100+ per user per module and thus allows more customization as well as access to custom functions. However, it wouldn’t hurt to have some movement towards that like say auto-numbering for custom fields or ability to have liquid code custom fields so you can concatenate two fields without having to create a custom theme for it.
But Idk what you guys think of that?