Fixing the Invoice Numbers
TL;DR: Invoice numbering will no longer be a nuisance to you.
CurdBee follows a very simple invoice numbering system. Every time you create an invoice, it’s assigned a number that was incremented from the previous invoice number. You have the full flexibility to change this to anything you want (other than a previously used invoice number).
This process looked good until we introduced Recurring Profiles. Invoices created from recurring profiles had an invoice number, which was derived from the Invoice No. given in the recurring profile and its iteration count. This produced invoice numbers such as INV001-1. Since there were no distinction between invoices generated from recurring profiles and manually created invoices, invoice numbers tend to get mixed up. For example, if you try to create an invoice after a recurring profile had generated an invoice, it will be suggested to use INV001-2. Then the 2nd iteration of the original recurring profile will be created with an invoice number such as INV001-3. At this point you will see the your invoices have totally unrelated invoice numbers and process of managing them becomes needlessly complicated.
A lot of you complained and we listened. Today, we have rolled out an update to solve these inconsistencies. The confusing Invoice No. field was removed from recurring profiles and was replaced with an optional Profile ID field. If you leave this field blank, invoices created from that recurring profile will always use an increment of the last invoice number in the system. So there would be a single invoice number flow, which is incremented serially.
However, if you want to provide a different numbering scheme to invoices created from a recurring profile, you have to specify the Profile ID field. The Profile ID will be used as the base(or prefix) of the invoice number and current iteration will be added as the suffix (ie. ProfileID-Iteration). This number scheme will be excluded from the regular invoice number flow and prevented from being mixed up with the other invoices as previously. The next iteration of the recurring profile will be guaranteed to have its corresponding invoice number.
Let’s illustrate this with an example: let’s say your main invoice number sequence is in the form of INV001-X, where X is the automatically incremented number. If you create a recurring profile with the Profile ID field blank, and the last invoice sent was INV001-14, when the invoice from this recurring profile is sent it will be assigned the number INV001-15. But if you had assigned a Profile ID as RB-1001, the first recurring invoice from this profile will be assigned the invoice number RB-1001-1, the next RB-1001-2 and so on, while your main invoice number sequence remains unaffected.
Hope this update would solve the troubles and confusions you had with invoice numbers. Please let us know if you still find any issues or see other ways to improve the process.
