kate wrote the following post on 7/17/2008 10:14:29 PM
The norm is an alpha-numeric code that you can organize in a way that makes sense to you, i.e. several letters of the Vendor name followed by enough numbers to make it always unique.
Most accounting software also has some form of "finder" to make it both easy and fast to move to the correct vendor record.
Perhaps your new software is intended for a small company with few vendors? or is intended for use with lots of vendors but expects you to find them by other criteria rather than the code used for indexing records?