Guidelines for Managing Document Sequences

Sequencing documents is an important business and legal requirement. Therefore, you must first decide the appropriate document sequence to use for a set of documents. Before you begin, here are a few prerequisites:

Determine beforehand the mode of document sequencing, because you can't switch to other types once a sequence is in use.
Note details such as the document sequence and document sequence category, for later reference.
Identify if there are any restrictions or configuration prerequisites.

Note:

Products that implement document sequencing have specifications about its usage. See the corresponding product documentation for specific details and also to identify if there are any restrictions or configuration prerequisites.

Creating and Editing Document Sequences

You can create document sequences that are automatic, manual, or gapless, depending on the business or legal requirement. By default, the current date is considered as the start date. The sequence definition never expires if you don't provide an end date. Among the several options used in creating and editing document sequences, the following options are functionally more important and therefore must be carefully identified:

Determinant Type: Select to limit the document sequencing activity to certain documents that belong to a specific business entity, such as Ledger, Tax Registration, and so on.
Initial Value: Enter a value for the first document in your sequence. This field applies only to sequences with automatic or gapless numbering types. Sequence numbers must not be more than 11 digits. If you leave this field blank, the first document is automatically assigned a value of 1. Once a document sequence is defined, you can't change this initial value.

Note:

The Display Message? checkbox is deprecated. However, it might be visible on the page, to support legacy values.

Creating and Editing Document Sequence Categories

Document sequence categories are defined to make it easy to assign document sequence definitions to a group of documents instead of to individual documents. Each document sequence category is mapped to a specific table, where the documents belonging to that category are stored. When specifying the table, you must consider the following points:

When the sequential numbering feature checks for completeness or generates a report, it finds the category's documents in the table.
Select only those tables that belong to the application associated with the category.
Once a category is defined, you can't switch to another table.

Assigning Document Sequences

Identify the documents to be numbered before assigning them a document sequence. For each document sequence, there can be only one active assignment to a document sequence category, and a determinant value (if applicable). As part of the assignment, specify whether the document is created automatically (for example, due to a batch process, or manually through a form). If you don't specify an end date, the assignment continues to remain active throughout the process cycle. If a determinant type was specified for the document sequence, then enter a specific determinant value related to the determinant type.

At runtime, when users create documents, the document sequence to be assigned is decided based on the following:

An active assignment that matches the correct combination of category
The numbering method
The date range containing the transaction date

Auditing Document Sequences

You can audit document sequences, if required, to provide an audit trail of the document sequences used in a specific product. However, before enabling the audit functionality for a document sequence, you must have created an audit table for the specific document sequence, using appropriate details. Enabling the audit functionality is allowed only for newly created document sequences. You can't audit document sequences that are already in use by a specific product.