This is a work in progress.
URN
Paragon has a Unique Reference Number or URN for each Customer Account. It is important to note that every Delivery Point must have a Customer Account even if payments are made to a head office for multiple delivery points.
URN’s never change and a customer will keep its URN until it is removed from the system. The URN will never be reused, the URN database field is ten digits wide so there is a maximum number of 9,999,999,999 accounts that is just short of 10 billion, so plenty of scope. The URN will stay with the customer even if it moves from one Round to another, this is an improvement of our older AcctNo system see below.
When Paragon is initially installed and set-up the client can deicide from two different types of URN.
System Generated
System generated URN’s are numeric and normally start at 1. When a new customer is added on to a Round the next available URN is automatically assigned by the system. The first customer will be given the URN of 1. When the customers are initially entered onto a Round they will be numbered sequentially, for example 300 customers on Round 1 will be numbered 1 to 300 and then 400 customers on Round 2 will be numbered 301 to 700. However if a customer is later added to Round 1 say after URN 100 it will be assigned URN 701.
User Defined
User defined URN’s are very flexible and allow the client to use an existing reference number when adding customers to Paragon. This is usually used where a Financial package such as Sage Line 50 is already in use. The user must know the reference number when adding the customer. The reference number can be alpha numeric and can be up to 10 digits/characters in length. Examples are “D1234”, “5534”, “BORS/WOOD” or “BOR001”.
User Defined, then System Generated
It is possible when initially setting up customers in the system to enter user defined numbers and then Dairydata can switch the system over to System Generated when going live. This is useful when a client has used customer reference numbers with Direct Debits or Standing Orders. The numbers can be retained in Paragon, but any new customers added later are given the highest existing +1, it is also possible to miss numbers out of the sequence. The only caveat is that numbers NOT characters are used in the reference.
Older Numbering Systems
When Paragon was first developed the reference number was not designed to be used by the client and was in internal number used to link various records in the database. The original reference field was called CustNo and has a limitation of three digits no there is a maximum of 999 customers allowed on each Round, even large doorstep rounds would never have more than 600 to 700 deliveries. Paragon still uses this field in the database, and until we have completed the entire conversion of the system to MySQL this is still a limitation.
In an attempt to give users a method of identifying accounts we introduced AcctNo’s (Account Numbers) this number was simply the 3 digit CustNo with either a two or single digit RoundCode proceeding it. For example 1001 is CustNo 1 on Round 1, 12034 is CustNo 34 on Round 12. Where RoundCode’s are letters AcctNo’s would be A001 or L034 for example. Although AcctNo’s are very useful there major disadvantage is that a customers AcctNo will change when they are moved from one Round to another. So AcctNo 1001 could have been 8321 last week.
Because of the limitations of CustNo’s and AcctNo’s we introduced URN’s into the system a few years ago. We have now made the decision that clients moving on to version 2.50 or above must be using URN’s as there referencing system so that we can remove CustNo’s and AcctNo’s at some point in the future. Clients will notice that AcctNo’s still make up part of the Invoice Number used by the system, this problem will be addressed again at some point in the future, probably by introducing a sequential invoice number when we introduce Daily invoicing.
