Are your Inventory items defined with one segment or multiple segments? This actually makes a difference in how IC justifies the Item Number field and how other programs such as Sales Analysis can use it.

My guess is that your IC items are defined with a signle 10 character segment. In this case, IC right-justifies the Item Number code, and this forces you to include leading spaces when typing into the finder field. If the IC items had been defined with 2 or more segments, they would be left justified. Not only would you not have to type in leading spaces, but you only have to type in a few characters to have the F5 finder position in the correct place alphabetically.

There is nothing you can do in Sales Analysis to change the method of entering Item numbers and avoid leading spaces.

Regards,