FAQ #: 118
I have a page in the my Daily Invoice Register for Duplicate Invoice Numbers. What does this mean?

When assigning invoice numbers, Answers will check the customer's invoice history to see if the invoice number being assigned has been assigned to that customer at any time in the past.

Invoice Numbers are typically assigned in a sequential number order. However, in Answers, we keep invoices not just with the invoice number, but also with the customer number and date. So, it is impossible to have a duplicate invoice in Answers. However, many of your customers will use just the invoice number from their printed form. In a situation where the invoice numbers have looped around and started over in Answers, it is conceivable that you could end up assigning the same number to the same customer again. It would not be a duplicate in Answers because we assign the date to each invoice as well.

But, in cases where you have high volumes and the invoice numbers wrap around frequently, a customer could end up getting the same invoice number within a close time period… such as within a year or two years, or in instances of really high volumes, within six months. In cases like this, your customer may kick that invoice out as a duplicate.

To prevent confusion on the part of the your customer, Answers will check the customer invoice history and see if that invoice number has been previously assigned to that customer. If so, it will skip it and go on to the next number. To keep from "wasting" invoice numbers, Answers will store a file of skipped number and pick that skipped number up on the next invoice it creates. This only happens on the same day of invoicing. If at the end of the day, there were invoice numbers skipped for being a duplicate that were not assigned to other customers, the nightly invoice register will print a log of those invoice numbers.

So, you may see invoice numbers being out of sequence because those numbers were duplicates on the customers they were originally meant for and therefore skipped and assigned to other customer orders later in the day. You may also see an additional log in the Invoice Register for "skipped", Duplicate invoice numbers that were not assigned to any customer.

In certain cases, such as with cash customer accounts that you do mail invoices to, or for customers that you are not concerned with duplicate invoices on (if they do not kick them out as duplicates), then you can disable this feature. You can enter the ampersand character (&) in the mailing codes in Customer Maintenance to disable Answers from checking for duplicate invoices on this customer. If you want to disable this option for all customers, you can run a Mass Maintenance to add the ampersand character to all customers at once.