It was a quite mysterious case that the AR manager presented. No matter how she generated the invoices and printed the invoices, one customer’s invoice printed out with a different format than the other invoices. We ruled out the usual suspect: picking the wrong report format when printing. If we printed out the invoices generated under Sales, Invoices, Delivery invoice generation, the one customer printed out with a different format.

Even if the customer’s invoice was included as part of a Recurring Task and all the other invoices appeared in the correct format, this one still printed out in the wrong format.

We tried printing it out manually from Sales, Invoices, Invoices, but the customer’s invoices still printed out with the wrong format.

What was different about this customer? Where was the system getting this invoice format? After pulling out the deerstalker hats and the magnifying glasses (in true Sherlock Holmes style), we followed the clues and discovered that the Customer had a Template code selected on the Commercial tab while the other customers didn’t. What was this field for? We investigated the field in the Online help Center:

“This field is used to indicate the reference of a print template listing the reports to use in priority (and the number of copies) with the documents used in commercial management. It is thus possible to specify the reports and to reserve them to some BPs.”

The Template code could be used to print out custom invoices for certain customers or print out invoices in a different language. The templates are created in Print templates under Common data, BP tables.

Once the Template code was cleared, the customer’s invoices printed out in the same format as the others. Mystery solved!