Trace a document reference
Every document in BMS carries a reference like SD-P012628 or SO-W029522, and
the letter in the middle is not decoration. In this walkthrough we will learn to
read one. Nothing here changes anything.
Before we start
You need admin access to Admin → Entities, and any document reference — from a job, an order, a deal or an invoice.
Step 1 — Break the reference into three parts
Take SO-W029522.
SO is the document type — a sales order. W is a single letter. 029522 is the
number.
Step 2 — Open the entities list
Go to Admin → Entities.
You should see the entities the business trades as, with a Prefix column of single letters.
Step 3 — Find the letter
Look down the Prefix column for W.
That row is the entity that raised the document. In this workspace W is the
Wollongong entity, P the main technologies entity, and F the finance entity.
Step 4 — Check what else that entity owns
Look at that row's Organisation column.
Several entities can point at the same organisation. That is the accounting entity they all report into — and the one that connects to Xero.
Step 5 — Compare two references
Find a second document with a different prefix, and put the two numbers side by side.
SO-P089399 and SO-W029522 are both current, even though one number is far
larger. Numbering runs per entity, so the numbers are only comparable within
one prefix. This is worth internalising: it is a common way to misread which of
two documents came first.
What we did
You can now read any BMS reference: what kind of document it is, which part of the business raised it, and why its number cannot be compared with another entity's.
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