Last updated: 2026-05-21

Anchorlet reference numbers

Every invoice in your workspace carries two distinct reference numbers. The Vendor ref is the contractor's own invoice number — whatever they printed on the document they sent you. The Anchorlet ref is the one Anchorlet mints when the invoice lands: a stable, workspace-scoped, year-stamped identifier you can quote back to your accountant, an auditor, or your own future self without worrying it'll change.

Both refs appear side by side wherever invoices show up — the per-invoice reviewer, the list view, the xlsx export. Quote the vendor ref when you're talking to the contractor; quote the Anchorlet ref when you're talking about your own records.

What an Anchorlet ref looks like

Two formats, depending on whether the invoice is attached to a property issue or stands alone as a company expense:

Property expense — ANC-{YYYY}-{NNNNNN}, e.g. ANC-2026-000247. Six-digit zero-padded sequence number, scoped to the year.
Company expense — ANC-{YYYY}-C{NNNN}, e.g. ANC-2026-C0042. Four-digit zero-padded sequence number with a C prefix to mark it as a company-series ref.

The counters reset each calendar year (UTC), so ANC-2027-000001 follows ANC-2026-000832 cleanly. Each counter is per-workspace, so your numbers don't interleave with anyone else's portfolio.

Why the system mints them

Vendor refs aren't reliable identifiers on their own. Contractors recycle invoice numbers, restart sequences when they switch accounting software, occasionally re-use the same number across separate jobs, and sometimes forget to write one at all. Two of your contractors might independently use "Inv-2024-001". The number on a receipt isn't designed to be globally unique — it's the contractor's internal bookkeeping marker.

The Anchorlet ref fixes that. It's:

Stable — once minted, it never changes. The vendor ref can be edited, corrected, re-extracted by the AI, even left blank entirely; the Anchorlet ref stays put.
Unique — no two invoices in your workspace can share one.
Searchable — Elliot, the list view, and the xlsx export all key on it, so quoting "ANC-2026-000247" finds exactly one row in your records.

Think of the vendor ref as what the contractor calls the document, and the Anchorlet ref as what your books call it.

Property expense vs company expense

Where the invoice was created determines which ref series it gets:

Property expense — the invoice is attached to a maintenance issue on a specific property (Tom Walsh's bill for fixing the boiler at Apartment 4, Burlington Road). The invoice's Anchorlet ref is inherited from the parent issue's ref — so every invoice on the same issue shares the same number. If the issue's ref is ANC-2026-000247, all invoices on that issue carry ANC-2026-000247 as their Anchorlet ref. This makes "every cost against this one issue" trivially findable.
Company expense — the invoice has no property or issue parent (your annual landlord-association membership fee, accounting software, a portfolio-wide insurance premium). These get a fresh ref from the company-expense series, e.g. ANC-2026-C0042. The C prefix makes them visually distinct from property expenses at a glance.

The two series share the ANC-{YYYY}- prefix but use independent counters. Your first company expense of 2026 is ANC-2026-C0001 whether you've logged one property expense or eight hundred.

Where you'll see the ref

The Anchorlet ref surfaces in four places, all read-only — you can't edit it from the UI:

Invoice reviewer (the per-invoice card on the issue page, and on the invoice detail page) — explicit "Anchorlet ref" field alongside the vendor ref, so you can sanity-check both at once.
List view, desktop — its own column in the table at /invoices, sortable like any other column.
List view, mobile — appended to each invoice card as "Anchorlet ref ANC-2026-000247" so the ref stays visible without the desktop table.
xlsx export — its own column in the spreadsheet download, sitting immediately before the "Anchorlet link" column. Your accountant gets it for free with every export.

Things to know

Allocated at create time. The ref is minted when the invoice row is inserted; existing invoices keep the ref they were given on the day they landed, even if the surrounding rules change later.
One ref per issue, multiple invoices per issue. If you log three contractor bills against one boiler issue, all three invoices share the issue's ANC-{YYYY}-{NNNNNN} ref. The vendor ref distinguishes them within that group.
The issue carries the same ref. The issue page shows the same ANC-{YYYY}-{NNNNNN} ref at the top — that's the source-of-truth identifier, denormalised onto each attached invoice for query convenience.
Gaps are expected. A missing number means an allocation that didn't land. Not a deletion, not a data-integrity issue — it's the simpler-shipping tradeoff documented in the schema.