Method Community

When you click "create invoice" from the footer bottons on a sales order screen of an existing sales order.

It takes you to a screen allowing you to select the items to invoice. from there you go to the screen to create a new invoice from the items you selected.

The "system" picks a number for you.

What I would like to do is have our "system" copy the sales order #. So that our invoice numbers and sales order numbers are the same.

How would I do that?

Hi JWS,

Just for some foundation, there are two main ways to populate the reference numbers for your transactions, either have Method create them or QuickBooks.  There is an option in Method, located on QuickBooks->Sychronization, towards the bottom of the screen you will see a label for "Assign Ref Numbers in Method"?  This is where you can choose to either have QuickBooks generate your transaction reference numbers, or QuickBooks.

I am not sure I can fully answer your question just because it might have to do with Accounting Principles I am not familiar with.  Both QuickBooks and Method, when creating reference numbers automatically, treat each transaction differently, meaning they each have their own numbering system.  So if you prefer to have them the same value (ie an Estimate and Sales Order), I just can't tell you if this would create any issues in regards to your books.

If you do wish to do something like this, I would suggest using the "Create Sales Order" button on the Estimate screen and make sure to include the Estimate RefNumber field so that you can use it to populate the SalesOrder RefNumber field when it loads the Sales Order screen.

Another option is to manually enter your reference numbers when you create your Transaction.  You could also restart your numbering system in any transaction by manually entering a value when creating a new one, for example let's create an Estimate with a refNumber of 1050.  The next time you go to create a new Esimate, it will go in order from the last number entered, so the next estimate, if not manually added at this point will be 1051.

-Ben

JWS.

I have clients ask for this all of the time. You would have to do some customization on the Create Invoice screen .   So that the SO number is populated as your Invoice refnumber.  The huge challenge with doing this is that ALL invoices created from SO's would need to be done in Method. If you generated in QB, QB would just pick the next number.  (you could change it manually if you want to)... Also, if you had an invoic that you entered without a SO and you entered it in QB - QB would pick the next numbers (your last SO number)....  So if your staff is careful and understands that - it is OK... and is a quick link to your documents.   The only distinguishing difference between a SO document and an Invoice would be the document type. So on reports would want to be aware of that.

After all that,  if you want some help, feel free to contact me offline.