I have several poorly designed codes (GL and AP) which make looking things up difficult. I was interested in the 'Auto-fill' feature which promises to resolve difficulties looking up differing lengths of codes, however I get the error message 'Auto-fill size cannot exceed length of smallest vendor code on file'. What am I missing here? If Auto-fill can only cope with static lengths of code what do I need it for? I was hoping it would help me out with my legacy coding.

Hi Hugh,

If you feel you have poorly designed codes in GL, AP or other applications, the auto-fill won't be the answer. Rather, you probably should be looking at the Toolkit for Adagio, which is an add-on product that will allow you to re-code your Accounts, Vendors, and many other records.

After your codes are configured in a consistent way, with all having the same length, then the auto-fill will be a useful addition. And you can specify the format that new codes must follow so that your coding does not go awry in the future.

Thanks for the upsell
So just to confirm, Auto-Fill is of no use to your customers who foolishly set up their account codes to be varying lengths? For example if my AP account code convention was 3+3 but my vendor was Mr Grocer and I ended up with 'MRGRO' I'm forever saddled with that vendor coming up ahead of 'AAAAAA'?

Well the Toolkit belongs to another company, so a sale there would make them happy, and hopefully you as well.

You are correct that if you have created codes of varying lengths, the shorter codes will always be positioned in the finder above those with longer lengths, regardless of the first character being A or z or 1 or whatever.

The way the auto-fill works in Adagio is that you specify the length of your code, and some character that will be used to auto-fill such as a period. Then when using the finder field to locate a code, you only need to type the first letter or two. When you then press the down cursor key or F5 to open the finder, additional (periods) are automatically added to what you typed, effectively positioning the finder grid to the first code that starts with the characters you typed.

Thus you would want to use the Vendor number changer in the Toolkit for Adagio to change the MRGRO code to something that fits your standardized coding, such as MRG001.

After that, you could then use the Vendor Code format setting in the Company Profile to enforce your 3+3 format (ie AAA999) so that in the future, you would get an error if you tried to create a new vendor with a code such as MRGRO.

And specifically for Payables vendors (not Ledger accounts, yet), there are places where you can look up the vendor by the Name rather than the code, such as in batch entry. Using this does not require changing the code structure, but is limited as not every place where vendors can be selected allow a lookup by Name.

Hello Hugh,

It was a pleasure meeting you today.

You can only "Autofill" to the length of your shortest code, because otherwise the fill would make your short codes inaccessible. You would never be able to type a 3 character code because Adagio would pad it out to 6 characters.

Thanks guys! At least I know it's not failing to work because I was missing a step!