Creating New Inventory Categories

 

4Renters expects new part numbers within a category to start with the category's numeric prefix.  This allows the system to search by part number or description depending on whether the first character of the entry is numeric.  If it is, the system searches by part number.  If it is not numeric the system searches by description. 

 

When you create a category, you enter the following: prefix, short description, full description, low number, hi number and separator. 

 

The prefix is designed to be a number.  I like to use values that increment by 10.  This way you can add prefixes near to existing ones for related items.  So, in the single-user data supplied during installation, the category having TABLES as the short description has 010 as its prefix.  This would mean the first table would be 010-0001.  The second table would be 010-0002, etc.

 

The short description is typically one word: the title of the category.

 

The full description is mainly used to clarify what the category does and doesn't include.

 

These next three entries control the format of the part number after the prefix.

The low number is the number used for the first entry in the category.  It defaults to 1.

 

The hi number is used to set the number of digits after the separator.

        9999 would set the number of digits to 4.

        999 would set the it to 3.

 

The separator is the character that separates the category prefix from the part's number within the catagory.  It defaults to a dash.