CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,

Someone has just asked me about something that seems to come up moderately often - how to add an invoice number to contribution or event registration e-mails. This seems like a common enough request that it would make sense to make it easier to configure.

But the complexity is what do people use for invoice IDs?. We get people to send in their payments by internet banking & to include the invoice number  so we generally don't like to use the invoice no CiviCRM generates (e.g. 954047b6c02c15bb10223c2bc7468186). Instead we prefer to use a combination of contribution ID, contact ID & participant IDs (with - separators). The bonus with this is that it is easy to substitue these numbers into CiviCRM urls to move from one contribution record/ contributor to another while receipting them

One tricky thing is that these are not generally assigned to the tpl files so we have to edit php files for such a trivial change (assigning ID variables)

I'm just wondering what other approaches people use. And whether there is a useful one that could be built into the next release

When using Attend Events 0.9, I did exactly what Eileen described. Looks like I might have to do the same here because invoicing with something simple, unique and sequential is paramount for tax scrutiny purposes