About Planning Your Item Numbering System

Before you begin to set up your item numbering system, you should:

1. List all your items.

2. Design an item numbering scheme that suits your inventory reporting needs.

   You need to design formats that will meet your needs for identifying items as well as for sorting and grouping items for inventory reports and lists.

   Once you decide on the types of item numbers you need, create one or more item structures in Inventory Control to use for formatting item numbers. For example, you may want all your item numbers to have the pattern #XX-XXXX. A sample item number using this pattern is #01-2C45.

Important! Keep in mind that it is easier to design your item formats carefully before entering them into the system than to change them afterward.

You need to be familiar with the following terms:

• Item number. An alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies an item in your inventory system. For example, #6094-734-8-W might identify a particular kind of size 8 women's shoes.

  Item numbers can contain uppercase letters and numbers. They cannot exceed 24 characters (including all segments, separator characters, and a prefix character).

• Item number segment. An inventory item number can consist of up to ten parts called segments.

  Different items can use different sets of segments. For example, some of your items could have numbers with two segments and some could have numbers with three segments. For example, you might use a segment to represent color only in the numbers of items where color is important.

  You use the segments to organize items by common attributes such as style, color, or size. You can use the segment to sort or filter the item numbers in reports.

  All item numbers must contain at least one segment. Each item number contains from one to ten segments. For example, item number #6094-734-8-W contains four segments.

  Item numbers can contain a separator character between consecutive segments and a prefix character in front of the first segment. For example, item number #6094-734-8-W contains the prefix character # and three separator characters (-).

• Item number structure. An item number structure describes the number of item segments in an item number, the order in which the segments appear, and the position and type of separator and prefix characters.

  You can define more than one item number structure, so your item numbers can have more than one format. For example, you could define one item number structure with three segments and another with four segments. You may be able to accommodate a mix of existing item numbers.

Sorting Order for Item Numbers

Inventory Control sorts item numbers for reports and lists from left to right in the following order:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Note: Separator and prefix characters do not affect the order.

Summary of the Rules for Item Numbers

• Item numbers in Inventory Control can be up to 24 characters long.
• Item numbers are assigned using an item structure. An item structure cannot be more than 24 characters long (including all segments, separator characters, and a prefix character).
• Item structures are made up of one or more item number segments. You can have item structures with up to 10 segments. For example, you can use a segment to indicate color, model number, or size.
• A single segment can be up to 24 characters long, including the optional separator character. (You could have no more than one 24-character segment in an item structure.)

  If some of your item structures have 2 segments, and some have 3 segments, your I/C system has two different item number structures.

• An optional separator character can follow each segment in the item structure so segments can be distinguished from each other.

  An optional prefix character can be specified to appear at the front of the item structure.

  The following table shows the separator and prefix characters you can use. (If you do not want a separator or prefix character, select None for Prefix and for Segment Separator in the I/C Item Structures screen.)

  Character	Description
  	None
  -	Hyphen
  /	Slash
  \	Backslash
  *	Asterisk
  .	Period
  (	Left parenthesis
  )	Right parenthesis
  #	Number (pound) sign

• Inventory Control ignores separator and prefix characters when sorting item numbers.
• Inventory Control does not use separator and prefix characters to distinguish item numbers. For example, the program considers the item numbers #5200-010 and 5200/010 to be identical since the only difference is the prefix and separator characters, even though the numbers were formatted using different item structures.

Note: You cannot enter duplicate item numbers.