I second this... there's also another suggestion similar to this that should be merged into this one (https://zohofinance.uservoice.com/forums/283818-zoho-books/suggestions/37470790-auto-generation-of-bill-numbers). Either auto generate or make the Bill # optional.

Bills are not always associated with received invoices as mentioned in previous comments; ie. Employee expense tracking/reimbursement, proper accrual accounting, vendors that don't issue invoice/bill #'s, etc.

My bills are created from PO's. These PO's are used to pay consignors for their items sold, so there is NOT a Bill that's generated by the vendor/consignor that I get. I just convert the PO to a Bill internally.

I've found that I can just copy the PO # and paste into the Bill # field, but it seems that could be just as easily accomplished automatically.

The support page on this seems to assume that all Bills are generated externally, but they're really not.

Yes, please. Also, would it be possible to have a feature to add references after the entry is generated?

For example, the bank feed doesn't have references. It would be great if we could run the references afterwards. IOW you can number the bank transactions that come in be feed with a statement number and transaction number or some other structured number.

See the idea regarding Belgium structured references for invoices.

There could also be an option to use the internal transaction ID number that you generate anyway when you linking the relational database modules.

Thanks for awesome progress from the team. Clearly, you guys are reading our comments carefully and creating these features.

I also thought this was weird. There's auto-generated numbers in other places, why not here? As Jamie mentioned in a previous comment - not ALL bills are created from an invoice that a customer sent. These are used for all kinds of tracking and budgeting. Even to help track paychecks/guaranteed payments to owners/investors.

Please add this as an optional feature that can be turned on or off as needed for recurring bills., it would help a lot.

It feels truly ridiculous to explain to employees that they need to "invent" randomly generated numbers for each bill. This system seems to only be designed for bills that were preceded by invoices. In any basic business accounting, you utilize recurring bills and one-off bills for budgeting and financial tracking. Every other module in Zoho allows the auto-generation of numbers except for Bills. I'll throw my 3 votes in here, and can only hope that Zoho project management understands how crucial (and basic) something like this should be for an accounting software.

The number of invoices taken from customer is used as reference number in system, but we use Bill number track the Bills and its very important because each customer has his own numbers and if I follow I can't no the order of bills and which first and how to archive so our Bill number is the key and its very bad idea to not generate automatically because each time we should check the last number and this cause several mistakes, and I hope Zoho add this feature and if you do not believe make it controlled you can enable or disable.