Numbering, Opportunities and Sales & Jobs Settings

Paperwork's Settings page controls how your organisation numbers documents and which rules apply to sales and jobs. This guide covers the General, Opportunities and Sales & Jobs tabs. The other tabs have their own guides, linked at the end.

Open Settings and save your changes

Click Settings under Admin in the sidebar. There are eight tabs: General, Opportunities, Sales & Jobs, Invoicing & Finance, Email, DWT codes, Portal and Integrations.

The first four tabs share a single Save changes button at the bottom right. You can edit across all four and save once, and you will see Settings saved. If something is wrong, the message from the server appears instead, for example "Invoice and credit note prefixes must be different".

The pipeline on the Opportunities tab has its own Save pipeline button. Email, DWT codes, Portal and Integrations save themselves and have no Save changes button.

Set your document prefixes

On the General tab, Document numbering controls the start of the numbers on your invoices, purchase orders and credit notes.

Field	Default	Used for
Invoice prefix	INV	Invoice numbers
Purchase order prefix	PO	Purchase order numbers
Credit note prefix	CN	Credit note numbers

Each prefix can be up to 3 characters and cannot be left blank.

Invoices are numbered when they are authorised, and a number stays with its document once it has one. Choose your prefixes before you issue your first invoice.

Set your Sales & Job prefix

This is the one setting that blocks you. Open the Sales & Jobs tab and fill in Sales & Job prefix (up to 3 characters, for example DSP). It has no default.

Until it is set, you cannot create a sale. New sale shows Set up a sales & job prefix first with a Set up the sales & job prefix button that takes you here, and the server refuses with "A Sales & Job prefix must be set in settings before creating a sale". Jobs are created from sales, so nothing downstream can start either.

Sale numbers are built from your prefix, then a department short code if the sale has one (price lists use P instead), then the year, month and a running sequence — for example DSP-2610001, or DSP-OPS-2610001 for a sale in a department with the short code OPS.

Set the rules for sales and jobs

Still on the Sales & Jobs tab, four switches decide what people must do:

• Require an agreement before creating a job — users cannot turn a quote straight into a job. An agreement comes first, and Paperwork refuses with "This organisation requires jobs to be created from an agreement".
• Auto-set a sales expiry date — each new sale gets an expiry date a fixed number of days after its date. Turning it on reveals Days until a sale expires, which starts at 90.
• Require a department on sales and jobs — makes Department mandatory on sales and jobs. Price lists do not use a department, so they are exempt. You will need at least one department in References first.
• Require a requested date on jobs — makes Requested date mandatory when someone creates a job.

Sales terms & conditions is a text box whose contents are appended to your sales documents.

Set the rental warning days

Two number fields on the same tab control the rental badges on the Asset tracking page:

• Rental warning after (days) — defaults to 35. A container that has sat on a site with no movement for this long shows Rental warning.
• Rental due after (days) — defaults to 42. After this long the badge becomes Rental due.

Leave a field blank to switch that badge off. 0 is a real value that means warn straight away, so a blank box and a zero are very different things.

Set your opportunity prefix

On the Opportunities tab, Opportunity prefix (default OPP, up to 3 characters) starts every opportunity number.

Show Opportunities in the sidebar is on by default. Switch it off if you do not run a sales pipeline and Opportunities disappears from the sidebar for everyone in your organisation.

Set up your sales pipeline

The Sales pipeline section lists the stages an opportunity moves through. Paperwork creates a default pipeline the first time your organisation needs one:

Stage	Probability	Outcome	Rotting days
New Lead	10	Open	7
Contacted	30	Open	14
Quote Sent	65	Open	10
Negotiation	85	Open	7
Won	100	Won	—
Lost	0	Lost	—

Each stage has a name, a probability from 0 to 100, an outcome (Open, Won or Lost) and rotting days. Probability drives the weighted forecast, and rotting days flag deals that have sat in a stage for too long.

Edit the stages

Change a name, probability, outcome or rotting days in place. Drag the handle on the left of a row to reorder stages. Click Add stage for a new one, or the cross on the right of a row to remove it.

Click Save pipeline

You will see Pipeline saved. Rows with a blank name are dropped. This button is separate from Save changes.

You cannot remove a stage that opportunities are currently sitting in — Paperwork says "A stage you removed is used by one or more opportunities". Move those opportunities to another stage first.

What to do next

• Set up finance settings for bank details, terms and invoice emails
• Set up your reference data, including departments and tax rates
• Learn how opportunities work
• See how rental warnings show up in Asset tracking
• Give your team seats and roles
• Setup guide, step 4: Choose your core settings if you are setting Paperwork up for the first time