Invoice numbering

[Shane Litherland]

Hi again, 
while i'm at it, another thing i noted with invoice/bill numbering:
as per gnucash user info, figured out how leaving invoice ID (for AP)
blank generates auto-number, and if one wants to change starting number,
can edit the counter in the code.
I'd started a new gnucash file once most of my learning was done, and
entered last year's stuff to check things were working for me :-)
Entered my early outgoing invoices, letting them autonumber. then, 
I had happily ploughed on through entering a lot of my bills (aka
oncoming invoices in AR), many without a bill ID then went back to
produce my next outgoing invoice, to find the number not incremented
from my last invoice... looked into it, realised the same counter got
used to number both incoming and outgoing invoices ('invoice' and 'bill'
are terms shown on most gnucash screens).

most places i expect would want to have outgoing invoices numbered
consecutively surely?

Once aware of it, decided best way for me now was to ensure i enter some
form of id for every bill (incoming invoice), to keep my outgoing
invoices numbering consecutively. But, i can see room for design
improvement here too - because with larger or multi users, leaves room
for user error. 
My suggestions - a separate counter for incoming/outgoing (i.e.
'invoice' and 'bill' counters) might work? provided one or both had some
prefix to identify "invoice 55" as different from "bill 55". My
experience, had a setup for producing invoices, or quotes. each had
their own 'counting' process, and data stored in different d/b tables
too, but e.g. the quote number was given a prefix. Or, the field already
in gnucash that identifies 'invoice' or 'bill' might serve well enough
to separate them without a prefix needed.
Discussion welcome - i can't write the solution, but happy to share bit
of brainpower to figure something :-)
Shane.

PS - I haven't looked elsewhere e.g. -devel about such a topic, if i
should be discussing this in e.g. -devel just let me know ;-)