Re: At the end of my teather with LSMB

[Luke <..hidden..>]

On Tue, 27 May 2008, ..hidden.. wrote:

> remember).  In the UK (at least; it may be the case in other  
> jurisdictions) there is a requirement that invoices be consecutively  
> numbered.  Our tax trolls get very upset by gaps or - much worse -  
> duplicate invoice numbers.  Much pain and suffering is often the  
> result: if the revenue suspects you of being naughty, you have to  
> prove your innocence.

That is bloody insane.  Got to love "free" countries.

> Is it possible, perhaps for 1.3, to generate a unique invoice number  
> on commit in such a way that each invoice is consecutively numbered  
> (and in such a way that there is no mechanism within the ui to alter  
> the number)?  I know that LedgerSMB generates a consecutive number if  
> you leave the field blank, but it should not be possible to override  
> this, and when using the "post as new" function, it certainly should  
> not allow a duplicate invoice number to be entered because the user  
> has forgotten to blank the field.

That would be good for various reasons.
However, making it user immutable, might not be reasonable.  What if, for 
example, you royally  screw up an invoice, perhaps by putting the wrong 
invoice number in on your own.  You will want to go back and fix that.

What needs to happen, I think, is that an invoice needs to be utterly 
unpostable, if the invoice number value is set to something which already 
exists.

The default is already to increment them (except that they don't reset at 
the start of the month, if you use something like <?lsmb YY ?><?lsmb MM 
?>-001 as your default).  I think they should always seek the lowest 
possible number, which would cause a reset.

Luke