Year, Date, Month Archiving

Some days I think big thoughts about writing. Some days, I’m just amused that the surprisingly useful little things you pick up as you build your career.

Case in point: numbering invoices.

I started out using the date as the basis for my invoice number. Anything sent on a day like today, for example, would be invoice 01112018-001. Day, month, year, followed by where it fell in the number of invoices sent that day (rarely more than one). 

A lot of the invoices I processed from writers tended to do something similar. Then, one year, an American author’s invoice for GenreCon broke the pattern. They structured their invoice number using year, month, date instead. 

For example, an invoice sent today would be numbered: 20181101-001

This is a really simple thing, but it made the invoice files incredibly easy to manage. Sorting by name immediately left everything in the date order, and it was easy to seperate out all the invoices from a tax year.

I started using it for my invoicing the moment I realised the advantages, and subsequently used at the start of any files where such ordering could be useful to me.

Tracking drafts of stories, for example, particularly when a project starts to iterate across programs. Given that I tend to start drafts in Word or Google Docs, then iterate into Scrivener when I need to break down the structure, it saves an incredible amount of time when figuring out which is the most recent file.