Why Your Invoice Number Should Come From a Log, Not a Spreadsheet Cell

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A common Google Sheets invoicing setup reads the invoice number directly from a cell, but this approach carries serious risks. If a user clicks the send button twice, two different clients can receive PDFs sharing the same invoice number, with no error triggered. The script can also fail mid-run — after sending the email but before writing the log row — leaving a sent invoice with no record in the ledger. Beyond technical glitches, tax regulations in many jurisdictions require invoice numbers to form an unbroken, auditable sequence, which a manually editable cell cannot guarantee. The proposed fix shifts number generation to the Log tab itself, using a function that parses existing entries and issues the next sequential number, eliminating race conditions and re-run ambiguity.

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