From what I can see the consecutive invoice numbers just follow on as normal regardless of the trading style applied. This is probably not a problem for the most part and I can work with this but would it be possible to make it an option to keep invoice numbering consecutive and unique to each trading style?
I can see that the answer will probably be no as the invoice number is generated when the invoice is created so it would mean changing this once you have selected a customer using a non-default trading style.
I held off before answering this as I wanted to check with our lead developer to see how feasible this would be. Unfortunately I’m informed that it’s not something that we can easily do without extensive changes to some low-level parts of our system. The challenge is where you may allocate an invoice to one client (picking up the sequence for that T/S) then later reallocating the invoice to a different client adopting a different T/S and thus needing to reallocate the number.
There’s also the problem of number collisions between different trading styles and this is problematic as we developed the system quite early on to avoid duplicates.
Unfortunately it’s not an easy one for us to address.
Do invoice numbers have to be entirely numeric or can they have an alpha prefix - if you set a different prefix per trading style (A00001 vs B00001, etc.) then there would be no duplication.
That’s a fair point, I had sort of assumed the answer could well be no for various reasons.
That’s what I started to do (2 digit alpha prefix) but then I noticed that the next invoice raised for a different trading style adopted the previous trading styles number, hence the initial question on the subject.
I suppose the changing of styles after creation could be addressed by simply marking that original number as void/deleted which would leave a gap in the numbering but it shouldn’t be an issue as the numbering is to some extent transparent for day to day use so as long as it is still there for auditing later it should work.
It isn’t a deal breaker though, it was just a nice thing to have if it was possible.