Invoicing options

Two things that would greatly speed up our invoicing process:

We are a law firm with many continuing matters and we invoice for the previous month on the first business day of every month. As our matters are continuous, our invoices will never be through the current (invoicing) date, which is the only default there is. It would be nice if we could change that default (through the previous month is what we would love, some people may prefer through the previous day as their default).
We use an invoice numbering system unique to each client/matter. As such, we can identify the client/matter with just an invoice number. It would be wonderful to have the option to designate a starting number for each matter instead of simply for each batch so that we could take advantage of batch invoicing. Because current batch invoices must be consecutive, regardless of client or matter, we are unable to use that feature.