Laravel Invoices: Auto-Generate Serial Numbers - 4 Different Ways

When working with invoices, you need to deal with serial numbers that look like ABC-000001. Do you know how to auto-generate them in Laravel? This tutorial will cover a few ways to do this.

DB Structure

For our example, we will use a simple invoice DB table with the following columns:

• id
• user_id
• due_date
• amount
• serial - Full serial number like ABC-1
• serial_number - Serial number like 1
• serial_series - Serial series like ABC

Here's how that looks in our migration:

Migration

Schema::create('invoices', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->id();
    $table->foreignIdFor(User::class)->constrained();
    $table->date('due_date');
    $table->integer('amount');
    $table->string('serial')->nullable();
    $table->string('serial_series');
    $table->integer('serial_number')->nullable();
    $table->timestamps();
});

This makes our Model look like this:

app/Models/Invoice.php

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Casts\Attribute;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsTo;
 
class Invoice extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;
 
    protected $fillable = [
        'user_id',
        'due_date',
        'amount',
        'serial',
        'serial_number',
        'serial_series',
    ];
 
    protected function amount(): Attribute
    {
        return Attribute::make(
            get: fn($value) => $value / 100,
            set: fn($value) => $value * 100,
        );
    }
 
    public function user(): BelongsTo
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(User::class);
    }
}

Create Invoice: Form

Let's create the Controller methods to save a new invoice and auto-generate the serial number.

This is the form, with series options coming from the config.

app/Http/Controllers/InvoiceController.php

use App\Http\Requests\StoreInvoiceRequest;
use App\Models\Invoice;
use App\Models\User;
 
class InvoiceController extends Controller
{
    public function create()
    {
        $users = User::pluck('name', 'id');
        $invoiceSeries = config('invoiceSettings.availableInvoiceSeries');
 
        return view('invoices.create', [
            'users' => $users,
            'invoiceSeries' => $invoiceSeries,
        ]);
    }
}

These are the config values:

config/invoiceSettings.php

return [
    'availableInvoiceSeries' => [
        'ABC',
        'DAF',
        'GHI',
        'UKS'
    ],
];

And here's the form in...