I have noticed that even when we do not add a reference in a Sales Order, a Sales Order reference appears in the invoice and is has the format YYYYMMDD.
Is it an issue others have or is there maybe a strange setting we have used?
Are you saying a sales order number appears on the sales invoice View screen when there is nothing on the Edit screen? Post screenshots of both.
You can see some Sales Orders that were issued on the 27th of June 2023. There is no reference.
But you can see below that the Invoices issued using those same Sales Orders now have a reference that is the date of the Sales Order in the format YYMMDD.
When I copy the Sales Order with no reference to the Invoice, Manager adds automatically the reference of the Sales Order even if there is no reference, and one has to remember to remove it:
It seems normal to me that when you copy a Sales Order to a Sales Invoice that the Sales Invoice references the Sales Order. If there is no reference on the Sales Order, Manager uses the date
Why is this a problem?
It is a problem because the Sales Order reference should be unique, it should only apply to one Sales Order. Instead all Sales Orders done the same day have the same reference. Plus I can see the date in the date itself of the Sales Order so it is an unnecessary repetition. I personally would prefer not to have automatically a reference chosen by Manager. Yes I can remove it manually, but it is pretty easy to forget to do so. Plus the Sales Order itself does not carry the reference, so what is the point?
You did not provide the Edit screen of a sales order you claimed was blank as I asked.
Also, show the form default screen for sales invoices.
Here is the Edit screen of the Sales Order. In the first picture I posted there is no Reference in the same specific Sales Order. Where do I find the form default?
If you need unique sales order number why not just enable the checkbox next to Reference?
Some clients send their POs with their own PO number coding (Reference in the Sales Order in Manager), and it can vary a lot from client to client, some use only numbers, some use numbers and letters. Some other clients send POs without any PO number. Therefore we only use the Reference in the Sales Order when we have a PO with a number. All other Sales Orders should stay without any reference. I think this is pretty straightforward?
No it isn’t. Manager will need something to recognise the Sales order with if you want to link it to a Sales invoice and therefore uses the date as reference. You can always manually enter any of the numbers you’d like in the reference field and in the absence of PO number you should add a reference yourself.
@mauroskov, you are resurrecting a topic already discussed at length many months ago. Sales order references used to be free-text fields, unlinked to anything else in the program. So you could enter your own sales order number or a customer’s purchase order number, or your daughter’s birthday.
When status tracking was added, more than a year ago, that free-text field was eliminated, replaced by the current linked field. The need to track status through invoicing was the motivating factor, as @eko has explained. A side effect of that is that the sales order reference number is now only for internal numbers. If you want a field for customer’s numbers, you must create a custom field.
Some of the relevant threads are: