Prefix Invoice

Last year I used 2014 as a prefix for my outgoing invoices. But in the settings this is considered a generic number, not a date. So my invoices from last year were 2014-1, 2014-2, etc… My invoices from 2015 read 2014-12, 2014-13, etc…

I tried changing the settings into 2015, but all the invoices now got this number…

Is it possible to have a prefix that Manager recognizes as a year? Even better, that the invoice number changes to 0 or 1 again…

Manager automatically searches for the highest invoice number and adds 1 to it. You can manually adjust the first invoice of the new year to reflect a prefix, such as 1501 or 201501, and all subsequent invoices will follow sequentially: 1502, 1503… or 201502, 201503… But Manager will treat these as ordinary numbers, so you cannot include punctuation marks like a hyphen.

If you use this approach, you must anticipate how many invoices you are likely to issue in the year. If you make the first invoice 1501, your 99th invoice will be 1600. That might work for a small consulting business, but not a larger company with hundreds of customers ordering products several times a year. So perhaps you will want to number your first invoice 15001 (allowing 999 before a problem occurs) or 150001.

Because these are simply numbers, prior invoices will not be affected.

You can try what I did. I set the Prefix as 15-. In my case, the first invoice is 15-001, the next was 15-102, etc. Of course next year, I’ll need to change the Prefix to 16-, but that wofrks for me.

The problem with Don_G’s approach is that the prefix you set on the Sales Invoice Template applies to all invoices, both old and new. So while it works fine for the year you start the business, next year, ALL your past invoices will be “renumbered” with the new prefix. You are not really renumbering the invoice, you are only changing the prefix Manager places in front of the number. If you look at the edit view for any invoice, you will see that the prefix shows in a gray box and cannot be edited. Only the actual sequence number can be edited.

The prefix is meant for situations where you have some internal preference for labeling. Invoice numbers might be preceded by an “I,” or you might like to replace the default # symbol with “No.” Or, if you have several businesses, you might code those from each business differently to simplify processing.

Ah…thanks for clarifying that. I just started using Manager this month, so I guess I would have discovered that fact next January. :slight_smile: Time to re-think things.

Looks like I’ll just get rid of the Prefix altogether and just start the invoice number as suggested; 15101, 15102, etc.

I’m actually going to get rid of prefixes anyway since they often don’t match user expectations and View Templates can do all what prefixes could have done and in more flexible way.

For example, unlike invoice prefixes, View Templates can allow you to have different invoice prefix for each year.