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.