Same Document number for Proforma and Customer Invoice

[former_member301510]

Hi Expert,

Is it possible to have same document number for Proforma invoice and Customer (Final) invoice?

We have a requirement that Independent, if one or several Proforma invoices generated on a project, the same number needs to be displayed and when proforma invoice is approved, it should only be changed from proforma to final invoice.

In short, there should be same invoice number through out the process.

Above requirement is for normal customer invoices as well as RRB invoices.

Kindly suggest.

Best regards,

Sandeep

[Lakshmipathi]

Do you mean to say, your client would generate proforma invoices from 1 to 5 and finally if 5 is approved, then your commercial invoice should start with 5? Commercial Invoice should always be sequential and if you club proforma number range with commercial invoice, it wont work. For each and every commercial invoice, there will be a gap in number range.

Also in some countries, you need to submit report to statutory authorities showing invoice wise sales details and wherever there is a gap in the invoice number, Business has to give justification and I am not sure, in which country, your client are doing the business.

Still if you want to go with this, you can try with USEREXIT_NUMBER_RANGE

[Jelena · Accepted solution]

In general, both proforma and regular invoice are stored in table VBRK where document number (VBELN) is primary key, so technically it's not feasible to create two documents with the same VBELN. However, as others pointed out, in some countries a different field may be used as a legal document number due to (rather weird, if I may add) requirements the government imposes in those countries.

Unless it's a legal requirement, I believe it's unreasonable to expect such functionality in SAP without turning it into ZSAP. You will not know the "final" invoice number until it's actually generated by the system, so even if you pursued some creative form printing you can't show this number on any other documents in advance.

[former_member301510 · Accepted solution]

Thanks Jelena for your response.