It is common for clients to use the phone number as the customer number.
Auto Customer Number: clients that do a lot of over the counter retail or wholesale transactions have opted to enable this feature. EPASS will automatically generate a customer number and will use the Last Customer Code to increment from. The customer number will be strictly numeric. Since you can setup AR variables per branch, you could have different numbering series per branch. If you use different numbers per branch, make sure to make the Last Customer Code long enough so they do not overlap; also have each branch start with a different set of digits. I.E. in the example above the customer numbers start in the 10 million range.
Here are some standards that we have seen and have been very successful:
Warranty Companies should use ‘W’ or ‘WTY’ and a short version of their name. I.E. WTY-GE or WTY-MAY. We do not want to use the full word ‘WARRANTY-GE’ because it is a lot more to type in every time. This also makes it easy for staff as they can type in ‘WTY’ to search for all warranty companies.
Third party finance companies like Wells or Citi should have their account number simply be ‘CITI’ or ‘WELLS’. This is also where checking Finance Company on the Customer Maintenance credit tab will make it easier for the sales staff to select the right finance company.
Apartment buildings or tenant occupied buildings will commonly use the landlord and the address or building name as the customer number. I.E. XYZ Property management has multiple buildings; you could make each building they manage ‘XYZ-1234MAIN’ or ‘XYZ-GREENTOWERS’. This makes it very easy to identify the building for both your staff and also the property management company when you send them an invoice or statement. This also keeps all of the buildings belonging to ‘XYZ Property Management’ together when you search by customer number.
In the case of builders or large projects where there are many units, you can also make the customer number (when you need to keep each unit separated) identify the unit. For example, ‘1234MAIN-101’ contains the address plus the unit number. As mentioned before, this keeps all the units in that development together plus benefits billing since the invoice and statement will identify the unit number.