Method Community

Hi,

When I create an invoice from a work order, the invoice# and customer Bill To & Ship To fields don't populate.

I've had this happen sporadically over the past couple months.....but, always when I save, open up another customer's invoice, and then go right back to the problem invoice, the fields populate. Annoying.... meant to write a post, but not enough of a thorn to do so I guess.

Tonight, one customer's invoice would not populate, even after logging out and back in again. I had to manually enter the info.

With a different customer, created another w/o, created invoice and again the fields did not populate. However this time, when I went to another customer's invoice and then back again, the fields populated properly.

I've modified the screens several times of course, but I don't *think* this is related, as it has been occuring for some time..and I got this one pesky occurence tonight.

thoughts?

 Hey Richard,

This sounds like a case of QB not being open. Let me explain what is going on.

In method by default if you do not enter an invoice #, it will wait for QB to assign one. So once you hit save, the invoice syncs with QB. It then gets the assigned Invoice #.  What is going on is when you switch to another user and then switch back, you are getting the update to date information. This includes the invoice number and billing information that QB just assigned.
When you were unable to get the invoice #, I would bet that QB was closed.

Test this out and let me know if I am wrong.

Test by closing QB, then create an invoice, you will notice no matter what you do. You will not get an invoice number.
Then open QB and wait for the sync to finish, Now you will be able to see the invoice #. Try this again with QB open when you start, you will notice when you refresh the customer information, you will see the Invoice #.

Hope this helps!

Ryan,

QB was open during these events, so I'm not sure why it was happening. Especially the invoice that would not ever populate the invoice number or customer info.

I've since created a few more invoices from workorders. Some were existing customers, others were Lead Status customers.  None will populate the invoice number or customer info upon hitting the save button, or print preview.QB shows them as being posted. Not sure if an invoice number is shown in QB...I forgot to check.

When I open another customer's existing invoice, and then hit refresh in the existing invoice list, a number is assigned to the problem invoice. I then open it up , and the customer info fields are now populated.

So, It's back to being workable at the moment, but is forcing a couple extra steps that we didn't have before. Would be nice to see if this is repeatable elsewhere.

I am also experiencing this problem.

To provide background, my sales rep starts by creating an invoice. He hits save but no invoice number populates the field. Thus, when he goes to print his invoice there is no invoice # making it silly for the customer and for us to associate future payments with a blank invoice number.

I would look into this further guys.

Hi Jacques,

As answered above, the reason for this is that Method needs to wait for QuickBooks to assign an invoice number to that particular invoice. The caveat here is that if Method is not immediately syncing with QuickBooks, whether because QB isn't open, or because there are resolve conflicts or problems with the invoice, this number will not prefill until this has been done. Unfortunately there isn't a way around this, as the alternative would be Method assigning its own invoice numbers to invoices, which would become problematic for QuickBooks. If you create an invoice and perform a changes only sync, that number should prefill with the corresponding bill and ship to information.

Denis

Hi Jacques,

One thing I wanted to add to the above, is that there is a work around to this which as with estimates, applies to invoices, however it will only work if your team only uses Method, as problems will come up if you use both QuickBooks and Method to assign RefNumber (invoice number) to the invoice. Have a look at that recent post by Paul, as it gives detailed instructions on how to do this.

Cheers,
Denis