Twice enter invoice by mistake

I entered one invoice twice by mistake. Shouldn’t there be a notification?

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There is No Notification Will Come as System Does not know That invoice Entered Twice.
But you can just Delete one Invoice.

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That’s what reconciliation is for

Sorry but reconciliation is of bank account statements thus payments and receipts. An Invoice is not part of reconciliation. The answer by @Omnipotent.inc is correct, there is no recall from database that would prompt such. Just be careful and check manually.

How would the software know you had entered an invoice twice?

Presumably, we are talking about a Purchase Invoice?

Some systems will pop a warning if you try to enter the same invoice number (reference) as already exists for same supplier. Typically won’t prevent you but give you a warning.

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Manager does not. It all depends onhow n application is developed. In essence Manager seems to be optimized for web interfaces and is much quicker than others. The offset is losig some functions such as described here. The real issue is more with accounting discipline and a software to prevent mistakes as such.

@11136, your question cannot be answered based on the limited information you provided. What do you mean by “I entered one invoice twice by mistake?”

Do you mean you entered two sales invoices with the same reference number? If so, you can edit one. Or you can set up automatic sequencing under Form Defaults.

Do you mean you invoiced a customer twice for the same thing? Manager will not prevent that, because customers often purchase the same thing over and over again.

Do you mean you received a sales invoice from a supplier and entered a purchase invoice twice in response? Again, Manager will not prevent that, because businesses often buy the same things over and over.

Do you mean you entered the same reference number on two purchase invoices? The solution is the same as for duplicated reference numbers on sales invoices.

In other words, what exactly is your problem? How would you expect the program to detect what happened? Why would you expect any type of notification?

Duplicate invoice number
I suggest not to repeat the invoice numbers, because this is really annoying. The program must give a notice that the number is duplicate or used before. In case of error, it is easy and simple in the programming language and coding the matter
In the event of implementation, I would be grateful to all

This all depends on many factors and one of these is the database design. A “lookup” command would search the database. In a relational database, this would be quicker than in a flat database. Manager would lose a lot of its speed when issuing lookup commands for things that are not that common and should be corrected by the users themselves.

For machine checking the program needs to check the relationship between two sources of the transaction information, then report differences.

So to do that another source of sales / purchase information is required. That information will depend on the details of individual businesses purchase / sales procedures.

An alternative checking approach is to characterise an individual businesses purchase / sales patterns and look for patterns unusual for that business.

As pointed out above, multiple similar sales or purchases is common in many businesses so not a universal error or warning condition. And making it an error condition would decrease Manager usability for those businesses and require many other similar checks to maintain consistency across the program.

In summary the consistency check improvements are required in the businesses operating procedures not the accounting program.

I mean very simply that I accidentally registered the same purchase invoice with the same code and the same date and the same supplier and the same products !!! other programs alert .what did you not understand?

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hello @11136

Even You have Entered All The things Same Then How Would System Understand that The same Item is Already Purchased Today and not purchased again.
and
it is Possible That The Same item is purchased from Same Supplier in the same qty On the same day.
So How System Understand that the same entry is not Valid And Entered by Mistake

it might be possible to receive a clone invoice in real life scenarios but as a minimum the reference number will differ. so in my opinion there is no need for an argument based on how a software can know if there are duplicate entries even if there are no differences. that is entirely possible.
Manager simply does not check for past entries and users are free to add duplicates. this is okay as long as we have the option to correct the intentional or unintentional mistakes.

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The thing is you either do all of these checks all at once or do nothing.

The reason being:

  • You can have the same invoice number from multiple suppliers
  • You can have the same items ordered twice from the same supplier in the same day.

Currently, no matter how many transactions you have in your database, the entry form is always quick and snappy. If such an alert is done at the form level, you’ll soon realize that this doesn’t scale all that well. I don’t want that to happen since I have 50k+ transactions in some businesses and I don’t want to have to wait for god knows how many checks when I want to post a single entry.

But I agree that something should be done regarding duplicate entries; in fact it’s in ideas at least twice:

https://forum.manager.io/t/feature-request-detect-prevent-duplicate-reference-numbers/26719

https://forum.manager.io/t/a-way-to-find-transaction-reference-discrepancies/35820

The best method I can think of for handling duplicates is either by:

  • A report, or
  • An alert banner in the main tab view

But even then, in regards to purchase documents, that will only create lots of false alerts most of time since the references aren’t internal. That’s a step backwards if you ask me.

In order for this to work well and not be annoyingly wrong most of the time, the supplier reference needs to be separated from internal references and separate checks should be done on those.

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@11136, answering this question only as it was addressed to me, I understood everything you wrote in your initial post. The problem was that you did not provide any information on what you meant by “one invoice twice by mistake.” Now you have. And now I can point out the difficulty of what you suggest.

Your example would require that every single purchase invoice entered be checked against the entire database for matching supplier, reference number, date, line items (item codes, descriptions, quantities, prices), and all options. Only if every single field matched would the two purchase invoices be considered duplicates. Now ask yourself, what happens if you make a mistake in one field? What if you forget to choose the withholding tax options on one of the invoices? What if one person chooses a different wording for a Description field? How would you intend that the program distinguish such a mistake from a deliberate entry of another purchase? The number of potential variations and complexity of defining rules for what constitutes an acceptable variation versus a duplicate are beyond imagination.

Accounting programs can never be fully automatic. You need your own review procedures to discover and correct mistakes. Manager provides several tools that can be helpful:

  • Sorting transaction lists by reference number, date, supplier/customer, etc.
  • Searching by any displayed parameter
  • Customer and supplier statements
  • Drill-downs on account balances
  • Sales invoice reports (for issues involving customers)

Best practices will include regular review of records as appropriate for your business activities.

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