Invoicing

Inserting the Invoice Number in a QuickBooks email

When you use the Send button in QuickBooks 2012 to email a copy of an invoice (or, the Email button in QuickBooks 2013) the content of that email message is set in your Send Forms preferences. Here’s a tip on how to insert the invoice number in the subject line of that invoice.

Here’s a typical setup for your send forms preference:

QuickBooks Send Forms preference

You can edit the Subject line an insert the tag “<NUM>”. This will make QuickBooks insert the invoice number at this point.

Updating the QuickBooks Send Forms preference

As you can see, the email preview shows the invoice number.

QuickBooks email with the invoice number

Very handy! This works in QuickBooks 2012 and 2013, it might not be available in older versions (I haven’t looked). You cannot use this in the body of the email message. Note also that special characters in the invoice number are stripped out – in QuickBooks I might have “2013-001” but in the email it will show as “2013001”.

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38 Comments

  • Excellent tip!! Went and changed it as I was reading it! Thanks so much. Love the articles.

  • Thanks Charlie – that is super cool! I tried it in my old QB Pro 2011 and it didn’t work, but I’m planning on upgrading to QB Pro 2013, and I will be SO happy to have it then!

  • Thanks, Charlie! Now, my question is, how can we set it to send us a read receipt? I don’t know how many times people say they don’t get the invoice when it’s been emailed from QB.
    See if you can get that one worked out–that would be great. I cc to myself generally just to be sure.

    • Jan, if you are using “QuickBooks Mail” you have no control over things, and BCC’ing yourself is the only way to know that it went out. I greatly prefer using Outlook for email, then the message is opened in Outlook and you can do whatever settings you want, and you get a record in your “sent” folder.

  • Hi and thanks for the tips. I will def use this.

    I email invoices all the time and PAID invoices too. Is there a way to. The problem is I have to change it from “your invoice is attached please pay ASAP” to “Your PAID invoice is attached”

    I wish there was two response emails for this. Is there?

    Thanks

    • QuickBooks isn’t smart enough to detect that an invoice is paid and to therefor use a different message. You can change your message to say something like “Please pay ASAP, but if you already paid then thank you very much”, or something of that sort.

  • Great one! Hi Charlie, hey, do you know the fix for the recipients that get their email invoices in winmail.dat format? A real pia..
    Thanks for all your great stuff.

    • Deb, I’ve never had my hands on a system that does that, so I can’t give you a firm answer. If you look around, you’ll see that this kind of thing probably relates to some of your Outlook settings, particularly if you are using Exchange Server. But I never see this on my system.

  • Umm you just really saved me so much time….I’ve been using the copy and paste command to manually add the invoice number to the subject line here! Can’t wait to get to my office tomorrow and change this! THANKS!

  • great tip but it doesnt work on my version
    Quickbooks Premier Edition 2012-13 Release R1P

    any suggestions?

    • Daniel, since you say “2012-13”, I’m going to guess that you are using the Australian version? These tips only apply to the US version. The Australian version is very different.

  • Nice tip. Great blog. I’m going to try and insert the po# which is much more meaningful to the customer along with the invoice #. Thanks!

  • Hi, further question, is it possible to insert customer name in subject line as well? Thanks a lot!!

  • Charlie (great site btw)

    I noticed when I send out invoices in QB 2013, via GMAIL, it shows ‘MAT’ as the sender. How can I change this to my full name or the name of my company? ‘Mat’ often goes straight to their junk folder.

    Thanks

    Mat

  • Charlie, is there any way to get the invoice number in the subject field with QB Online Plus? Please advise.

    • I believe it does but I’m not sure. I don’t pay much attention to QuickBooks email – the Intuit-provided service, as they are working to discontinue that service. They just removed it from QuickBooks in the 2015 R4 release, so it won’t be around much longer.

  • Hi,

    Can you also automatically add in the customers ‘purchase order number’ after the invoice number in the subject line?

    Many thanks, Dave

  • I wanted to know if it is possible to include the PO# in the subject line the same way that you included the Invoice . I would like all of our invoices to be sent with our customers PO# as a reference in the subject line.

    Thank you for your help.

  • How do I insert invoice numbers into email subject line using QuickBooks 2014?
    Thanks in advance.