Is there a way to have a part number begin with a zero in Inventory?

If not what tricks do people use?

Steve

Hi Steve:

I feel like I'm telling you things that you already know, but here goes: You can have leading zeroes when the Item code has 2 or more segments. In cases where users don't want segments, I make segment 1 = 15 characters and segment 2 = 1 character with a space as the dividing character.

Make the item number 2 segments, with period "." as the separator character.

Thanks guys, I should have know that, but I forgot.

Steve

Hi Steve,
We have some sites and we have setup as what Bruce has suggested, but we always get bitten by any CSV file imports back into Adagio that are random throughout Adagio and CSV is the only available working import option.

And then we feel the pain because the CSV file imports always trim off the leading "00"'s. Your client has created a need to import and you have a non-working XLS file type import. And inventory item fields are affected.

It would be so nice if every import in every module was consistent and worked with XLS or XLSX, or just eliminate showing the Excel option if the option is not available as one of the import options.

Best,
Brian

Leading zeros are not stripped on imports of multi-segment item numbers.

Opening a CSV file in Excel, and saving it back as a CSV will result in EXCEL removing the leading zeros.

CSV files should only be opened in Notepad or some other plain text editor. If you are going to open them in Excel, then need to be VERY careful that the formatting is not changed.

Agree, but sometimes the CSV import file has an error and big import files are ugly to deal with notepad. Because then, you have to be extremely careful.

We do tons of importing, and our one suggestion and we don't need a calendar for this idea, is be consistent with the ability to do imports with the formats shown as available. A specific example is bank statements in BankRec. Many banks and credit card downloads now offer XLS and some offer XLS instead of CSV. Or we can use OFX. And the XLS import format does not work.

We are installing BankRec to reconcile Credit Card statements which is one of the reasons we would like to see XLS as one of the working import file types.

So if the drop down option for import file format says you can do Excel, then the program should be able to do Excel. Please don't waste our time planning and creating an import template file in XLS or offering up specifications to a 3rd party developer that we can take in XLS or CSV because the program import suggests that you should be able to do XLS, and then only offer CSV with a nice error message when you save the import template with XLS file format.

And yes, we can pre-test every import document type to see if the XLS actually works. but we're looking for efficiency here.

Thanks,
Brian

We are happy, given an import file, template and dataset to adress any issues that are exposed by that combination. The statement "XLS import format does not work" is broad and can be disproved by demonstrating a single case in which it does work.

And, when discussing download files from a bank or other large institution, there is also the question about whether they have formatted the file correctly, and if not, who is responsible for dealing with the error.

For bank statements, we recommend using the OFX file format as it has generally been the easiest to implement and demonstrated the fewest anomalies in formatting.