Recommended Rules for loan and customer numbers
Make all customer numbers the same length. Make all loan numbers the same
length.
If they are of different
lengths, they not sort like you expect them to.
Loan numbers and customer
numbers can be of different lengths.
Make loan numbers as small
as possible to handle your needs but as long as necessary to handle your
expected growth.
If you have 100 loans and
never expect to fund more than 999 loans use 1001 – 9999
If you have 1200 loans and
expect to make a hundred loans a year for the next 20 years, use 10001 - 99999
If you have a real need to
you can prefix or suffix the numbers with one or two alpha characters.
You can also use completely
alpha ‘numbers’. Example “ABCD”
Whatever you do, DO NOT use punctuation or spaces. 90% of support requests
‘lost’ loans or customers are caused by the user typing the wrong punctuation
character or two spaces instead of one.