Renumbering customers and invoices

Buddha Buck blaisepascal at gmail.com
Mon Jul 28 20:31:39 EDT 2014


I have a bunch of customers in my GnuCash file, all of which have been
auto-numbered by GnuCash when I created them. I also have a bunch of
invoices on those customers, also auto-numbered. These invoices represent
ongoing, monthly payments, and I do not generally send copies of these
invoices to the customers unless they ask (they don't).

Because it's always nicer to automate things which can be automated, I am
currently working on auto-generating a CSV file for importing the invoices
on a regular basis. As such, I would like to generate invoice IDs for these
monthly invoices, of the form CID-YYMM, with CID being an alphanumeric
customer code, and YYMM being the year and month (so a typical invoice
would be BMB-1407, for instance, and in 2.5 years someone will get
NCC-1701).

I have verified that I can create new customers and new invoices within
GnuCash wih the requisite format. I have verified that I can change the
customer ID number and the invoice number (on unposted invoices).

It appears to work without breaking things. But I I'd like a sanity check.

Is there likely to be any problem from renumbering existing customers
and/or invoices? Is there anything relying on those IDs that would break if
they were changed?

If I expected my customers to have copies of the invoices and keep those in
their records, changing the invoice numbers would be dubious at best, but
that's not the case here.


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