Transaction numbers are essential for maintaining organized, auditable records in your account. This guide will help you set up and manage the prefixes and sequential numbers used to generate them, to align with your business processes and ensure seamless transaction tracking.

Prefixes are short codes that appear at the beginning of every transaction number, e.g., PO, SI, SO. They work together with sequential numbers to create a complete transaction numbering system that helps you instantly identify transaction types and maintain consistency across your business records.

For example:

Every business has unique requirements when it comes to transaction numbering. When initially configuring your prefixes and their starting sequential (next) numbers, consider the following:

To update your transactions' prefixes and next numbers:

Once you've created transactions, the relevant prefix and next number fields in the Prefixes page become locked for data integrity. Should they need to be unchanged, your Account Owner can submit a request to the support team.

Unleashed supports prefixes for all major business transaction types, which can be updated via the Prexies page, and allows you to establish the next number for most types before the first transaction is created for it. The default prefix per transaction type is listed in the table below.

When transactions are created directly in your account, your account automatically increments each transaction type's number by 1, eliminating human error and ensuring no duplicates or gaps in your active records.

However, as Sales Invoices and Sales Shipments are transactions that are created from an originating Sales Order, their transaction numbers are generated using their transaction type's unique prefix and the Sales Order's sequential number. For example, when the Sales Order's number is SO-00000239, its Invoice number will be SI-00000239, and its Shipment number will be SS-00000239.

When multiple Invoices or Shipments are generated from a Sales Order, each invoice or shipment created after the first will include a fixed incremental suffix in the format "/1". For instance, the first invoice will have the Invoice number SI-00000239, the second Invoice will be SI-00000239/1, the third SI-00000239/2, and so on.

Similarly, when Purchase Orders are split receipted, each new Purchase Order created for the outstanding order quantities will use the originating Purchase Order's sequential number to generate its order number, but will include the fixed incremental suffix. For example, the original Purchase Order will have the number PO-00000151, and the first split receipt will generate a subsequent Purchase Order with the number PO-00000151/1.

Whilst transactions created in your account will have transaction numbers automatically generated for them, which cannot be altered. There are additional options available for specific situations that require more customization or flexibility.

When creating Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, or Assemblies using the Import function, you can use custom prefixes and numbers that do not follow your account settings' prefixes. This allows you to maintain specific numbering schemes or import historical data with original numbers.