Document Number Assignment

Requisition, purchase order and receipt numbers can be assigned by three different methods:

·     Automatic number assignment

·     Manual number assignment

·     A combination of automatic and manual number assignment

The desired number assignment method can be chosen separately for each of the three document types on the Purchasing System Defaults Reference File category.

Use

The number assignment method is activated each time a document is created.

·     For automatic number assignment, the system automatically assigns the next available document number to the document being created.  The user cannot enter a number in the document number field.

·     In manual number assignment, the user must type in a document number for every document created.  The system then verifies that the entered number does not already exist.

·     When a combination of automatic and manual number assignment is used, the system automatically assigns the next available document number if the user leaves the number field blank.  If the user does enter a number, the system simply verifies that the entered number does not already exist.

These defaults can be changed at any time by modifying the code on the Purchasing System Defaults record on the Reference File.

Considerations

The next available document number is recorded in a separate Reference File category for each document type.  Each of these categories is automatically updated after each system number assignment.  In the case of combination automatic and manual numbering, the system also checks that the next available system-supplied number has not been already assigned manually.  If so, the system searches for the next sequentially available document number.

New document numbers are retrieved at the time of conversation select validation.

The combination of manual and automatic number assignment may be useful in several instances.  For example, during a temporary system shutdown, buyers could continue manually creating purchase orders and assigning them numbers.  When the system is running again, these manually created purchase orders could be entered at the same time as any new purchase orders.  Thus, buyers would be able to send manually written purchase orders to vendors, and the purchasing department would not be halted by the shutdown.

In cases such as this, it would be a good idea to define a specific range of numbers -- beginning with a specific letter, for instance -- for this recovery procedure, so as to avoid assigning the same number twice.