Customer reference number

[andy-milford]

We use a commercial finance company who take care of our invoices on our behalf. What would be helpful is a place where we could perhaps note individual customer reference numbers that would then feature on an invoice. Would something like this be possible?
At present the only option I can see would be to put the customer reference in the purchase order section but this is labour intensive as the customer reference number doesn’t change and when customers do need a purchase order refences I can’t use this section.

[luke]

Thanks for putting this forward, Andy. We’ve a solution for you

You can create your own custom fields for customers in Breww, and we’ve today added the ability for you to use these in custom invoice templates, which should allow you to store this information against customers and show it on their invoices.

To get started, head to Customers → Settings & tools → Custom fields and create a custom field. I’d suggest naming it something like “Finance company reference number” so it’s very explicit what it is used for, and choosing the type of “short text”. You can make it required if all customers will always have one, but if any do not then it’s probably best to leave it optional.

Once this has been done, whenever a customer is created or edited, you’ll see a new field for this information. You can then start to fill this information in on your customers.

Finally (and this is the bit that’s only just become possible today), you can edit your invoice template to use the custom field that you just created. We have a guide on how to edit these templates at Customising PDF invoice, delivery note & credit note templates, but to get you started, you can copy and paste the following code:

{% if is_invoice and customer_custom_fields.finance_company_reference_number %}
    <br>Reference: {{ customer_custom_fields.finance_company_reference_number }}
{% endif %}

Into the part shown here (this is part of the “Header” tab):

And this will show the word “Reference:” followed by their reference number, on the line below the phone number (and only on invoices for customers that have this filled in).

If you went with a different name of your custom field, it might need a different “variable” name. The first tab on the invoice edit screen should show you all the options. You’ll find your variable name listed with the prefix of “customer_custom_fields.”

I hope this is useful and thanks for the great suggestion