Hi...I'm new to the forum and an "intermediate" level FM person...I apologize if this question is elementary, but...

How can I create an "Invoice ID" field that utilizes the first 3 or 4 characters of a company's name and a company-specific serial number??

Eg: if I have 2 companies in my DB (Curly, Larry) and I generate invoices for each of them. I want each company's invoices to have their own sequential serial #'s, even if the invoices themselves are not created sequentially. So, Curly's would always be CUR-001, CUR-002, CUR-003, etc. and Larry's would be LAR-001, LAR-002, LAR-003 regardless of creation order vis-a-vis the other company.

Is there some way to build the field such that it looks for the Customer's invoices and puts the NEXT serial number for THAT company, instead of just a standard serial number? Thanks!

Yes. store the invoice numbers in a single-record table, and script the process to edit the record and increment the appropriate number each time an invoice is created.

Note, please, that you should NEVER use these invoice numbers as the key fields for the table relationships. Use normal auto-entered serial numbers for the primary keys. The users never neeed to see these anyway.