There are a few fields that have old data stuck and I have no idea how to get ride of it. For example, when I click to copy a Sales Quote to become New Sale Invoice, the invoice number is always stuck as the same exact number 15112020 on all invoices. (15year 11month 20day and the last 20 indicates an internal invoice code). This number used to follow a sequence, but now it is just permanently stuck as the same exact number on all new invoices unless we manually click to change it.
Also when we add a New Purchase Order … we have an old Reference number that is stuck on all New Purchase Orders unless we manually remove it. Can anyone help me with this issue? Thank you
It’s not random. It means there is an invoice with number 15112019 and the way Manager generates new reference number is to find the existing invoice with the highest reference number and add one. That’s why new reference number is 15112020.
@ILoveMovingUSA, the explanation of why you seem to have fixed data shows how careful you need to be if using any numbering scheme besides a straight, automatic sequence. Manager treats the invoice number as an ordinary number. Your approach of YYMMDDXX produces numbers that jump by huge amounts. For example, when the year changes, the apparent sequence jumps by 1,000,000. When the month changes, the sequence jumps by either 10,000 or 100,000, depending on whether the new month is a “2-digit” month. This would all be complicated even more if you don’t use filler zeroes for 1-digit months, days, and invoice codes.
My question is why you are trying to put a date into the invoice number in the first place? When you look at the invoice list, date is the first column and the default sort parameter anyway, with invoice number next.
We measure everything by date. We measure how many quotes we put out each day. Example: 160331-3QU means this was the 3rd quote we had on March 31, 2016. We also measure how many invoices we have each day. Example: 160401-2INV means this was the 2nd Invoice we had on April 1, 2016. We are a moving company and most folks move around the same time each year. So dates are very important to us. And if we label everything by date, we can better gauge our staffing and supplies needs. We also use this same type of numbering system with PayPal when accepting credit card payments. Did this answer your question?
I had to back track and found the issue … thank you for your info. However, I still have the same old reference number stuck in creating new Purchase Orders. Any suggestions how I can get rid of it?
An independent consultant – or any company for that matter – might not want its customers to be able to figure out how much work it has. If invoices are numbered sequentially, then the customer who receives Invoice #109 on March 1 and then Invoice #113 on April 1 can kind of guess that the consultant/company has issued only three other invoices that month. When a customer knows that you don’t have much work, you lose some of your bargaining power. That’s a good reason to obfuscate invoice numbers, and using dates as a prefix (like #16040102 for the second invoice printed on April 1, 2016, or #1603006 for the sixth invoice printed in March 2016) is a good way to make sure that numbers always increase while not revealing anything about the company’s volume.