Geoff,

>1. User enters order and an invoice number is retrieved off of sysdata and updated in arsysd

First, you should just ignore arsysd.dbf. Deal only with sysdata.dbf. The process of retrieving the next invoice number should also increment it for the next use at the same time. John mentioned g_gettno(). You should look at that, It is a procedure in SBTPROC.PRG In SBT credit memos take the next number in sequence, just as an invoice does so if you left the number intact, it will get used up.

I think I see what you are doing here and I have a suggestion for how to do it if you aren't too far along. Have you dealt with all of the other files that are normally updated in the process of creating an invoice (arcust, ardist,ictran, icdist, etc) Let me know if you want more info and I'll explain further. We have 3 programmers here that work extensively with SBT Pro 5.0

Bill