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I had a search and can't seem to see anyone asking for this, apologies if they have!

We use Xero’s repeating invoices for monthly services and have them set to automatically publish and send to save administrative time.

However, because the invoices are automatically published, nobody is manually reviewing or updating the invoice reference before it is sent. This makes it difficult to quickly see where we are in a fixed-term series of invoices and also makes the existing references quite inconsistent/messy.

Would it be possible for Xero to introduce a dynamic sequence placeholder for repeating invoices, so that the Reference field could automatically increment each time the repeating invoice is generated?

For example, for a 12-month engagement:

• Invoice 1 → [1/12]
• Invoice 2 → [2/12]
• Invoice 3 → [3/12]
• …
• Invoice 12 → [12/12]

Ideally, this would be generated automatically by Xero without requiring the invoice to be saved as a draft or manually edited before publishing/sending.

The purpose is both to keep the references consistent and to provide a simple visual control so that we can immediately see which invoice in the 12-month series has been issued.

We would envisage this working as a placeholder within the repeating invoice template, for example:

Monthly Services [1/12]

which Xero would automatically change to:

Monthly Services [2/12]

on the next invoice, and so on.

This would allow businesses to retain the efficiency of automatic publishing and sending while providing much better visibility and control over recurring invoice sequences.

If after that point the renewal cycle pushes itself into draft to be reviewed/ check if the quote has been amended for the year, that would be fantastic. It would just make the admin a lot cleaner. Especially for those of us with a large amount of clients who have different agreements on their invoices.