Continuous receipt number

[moddad]

In Norway there is a law that says you have to have a continuous receipt number on every receipt (0001, 0002, 0003 etc.) that is automaticly generated by some appalication. This is because you have to be able to prove that you havn't deleted or added a trasaction in the income statement. 

If I have understanded it correctly there is a transaction ID in the receipt if the buyer pays by PayPal, and if i pays by credit card there is also a receipt number. These numbers are unique, none are have continuous number.

I now that you have this in the invoice you can send by PayPal, but it's not very efficient to write a invoice manualy when there already is a automaticly generated receipt. And besides, there is not any option to change the look of the invoice so that the buyer understands that it's a receipt and not a .

Anyone know a possible solution? I love PayPal and would hate to be forced to convert to an other service.

All help is appreciated. 

[PayPal_Frank]

Hi moddad,

Welcome to the community! 🙂

PayPal does not offer a continuous receipt number for a merchant.  The receipt IDs we issue may be continuous for us across all our merchants (I'm not sure) but it obviously wouldn't be continuous for one specific merchant.

I'm assuming that you are accepting PayPal on your website using a shopping cart or PayPal buttons?  It's possible to code your website to dynamically assign your own custom receipt number for each transaction.  This could be done using a few different PayPal checkout variables:

The "invoice" variable is designed for exactly what you want.  But you could also use these variables too:

item_number

The option variables: on0,os0

custom

So the difficulty would be coding your website to dynamically change the button code to increase that variable by 1 for each purchase.  I'm sure 3rd party shopping carts that support PayPal may have settings to automatically do this as well.

I hope this helps! 🙂

- Frank