Hi All - new to the channel here so I'm not sure what the right protocol is, but I'm looking for some advice/help on entity numbering. We are in pre-implementation right now and I'm trying to decide whether or not we should number our customers and vendors. Does anyone have any advice on the pros/cons of using customer and vendor numbers instead of just names?

We chose to number Customers because we were originally imported them from a legacy system and we wanted to easily identify the source and for customers to use the same account number. We know that Customers starting with 1 originated in Legacy system 1, Customer starting with 2 originated in Legacy system 2, and Customers starting with 7 originated in Netsuite. One annoyance is that on reports and saved searches, the account number and name are usually concatenated, even though they are separate data fiels on the customer record. I'm sure there's a way to avoid this but we haven't taken the time to look into. We don't number vendors. AP wanted to manually create the vendor ID as an abbreviation of the vendor name.

i for one, don't like numbering...i find it annoying on the clients that have it. I've had some clients that came from legacy systems, and we just made a custom field to store their legacy system number (helped with global search only really)

I'd recommend not numbering unless you have a really compelling reason to do so. As Betsy mentioned, most places the number + name is concatenated and it can be painful so separate it if needed. Also it used to be the case (though I think they fixed it in most places) that on some lists and reporting if you had numbers enabled, the report would show the only the number instead of the customer/vendor name. Which is obviously mostly useless.