Sales Invoices have automatic invoice numbering. This is useful when dealing with overpayments and underpayments so that we can find which invoice to allocate these payments to.
I just had to deal with an overpayment/underpayment situation with Purchase Invoices and noticed that there is no automatic numbering on PIs. I had to make up some random number in order to find my invoices when allocating the payment to clear the overpaid/underpaid status.
Can automatic numbering be added to Purchase Invoices please?
Can numbers be added to purchase invoices retrospectively to make this system function? Adding them manually seems counterproductive for thousands of invoices.
This wasn’t important until the latest change to supplier and customer credits and the need to allocate payments to individual invoices. Implementing invoice numbering on Purchase Invoices would therefore be very helpful.
Purchase invoice numbers are meant to be taken from your suppliers’ sales invoice numbers. A purchase invoice number assigned by your accounting system would be meaningless when dealing with a supplier.
No. Past transactions are not modified by program changes. That could seriously disrupt your records.
The recent change to how overpayments are handled did not remove a capability, it added one. If you leave the invoice number blank on either a sales or purchase invoice, Manager will allocate overpayments to other unpaid invoices for that supplier or customer, just as it did before. Any payment in excess of the total amount receivable or payable will go to a contra balance for that customer’s or supplier’s subaccount in Accounts receivable or Accounts payable. This is explained in these two Guides:
There are two fields in Manager. Invoice number and Order number. In any case, there still needs to be a way to identify documents in Manager irrespective of invoice number or order number have been entered. All documents in Manager are unique and need a visible unique identifier irrespective of what the user has entered into the document.
The Order number is for your purchase order number. If you copy a purchase order to a purchase invoice, that number carries forward automatically. But a purchase order has an automatic sequence number because it is your document, not the supplier’s.
I think the po number can be place in pi screen as reference + shortcut to respective po but not in print form. But then again is it usual we issuing purchase invoice???
This needs to happen for better interoperability between documents. That’s when documents can share statuses such as which sales invoice as had a delivery note associated with it and so forth.
Yes the purchase invoice comes from the supplier which should NOT be my transaction reference number anyway.
The main reference number used should be a system generated purchase voucher number which is unique and serialized UNLIKE supplier invoice number which are erratic and have gaps in them.
This is helpful for the following reasons:
Ensure each number is used for 1 transaction only.
Ensure effective audit trial over deletions since the gaps in numbers means something was deleted.
Because of (1) & (2), this enables proper physical filing based on unique and serialized number which in turn makes physical document retrieval effective and efficient.
Additionally, supplier invoice numbers should also be maintained as SECONDARY references for the following reasons:
To identify duplicate supplier invoices (we cannot enforce this because some suppliers will give duplicate numbers, but we need to know anyways … not everyone is organized)
To enable reconciliation with supplier Statement of Account.
And in case you were thinking of it, no we cannot use alternative numbers such as PO number because:
Not all purchases are made using a PO (remember your target client base are SMEs)
POs can be cancelled and thus leaving gaps that are not necessary.
Right now I am using system generated number for purchase transactions and keeping supplier invoice reference in the description which is not ideal but it is a workaround. I also do this for receipts & payments for bank reference #.
[Edit] I just remembered that Manager allows custom fields, which makes my workaround stupid. I am now making a custom field called supplier reference.
have you considered use of custom fields for this and setting them to show as a column?
you can use this custom field to enter the actual invoice number received from your supplier while you can set the default invoice number field in Manager to record internal numbering automatically.
