Why are my contracts displaying in different sequences?

Enterprise contract numbering can't always be guaranteed to display sequentially without having some gaps in the numbering display structure. For example, using the Manage Document Sequences task, you might have created a sequence for your contract documents and the initial contract number is set to 5010001. You're expecting the contract number to be incremented by 1 such as 5010001, 5010002, 5010003 and so on but this isn't always the case and you get different sequence results.

You can't depend completely on contract numbers being displayed in sequence even if you've gapless sequencing in place to ensure document numbers are assigned consecutively without any gaps.

Let's say you've a scenario where two people are creating contracts at the same time and the sequence numbering is set up to increment the contract number by 1000. In cases where the contract wasn't successfully generated or the number was already generated or a contract gets deleted, then the next time you successfully create a contract, it skips the sequence number because it's already generated.

The number sequencing issue with 1, 10, 11 is a very common one. For example, all contract names starting with 1 are listed, then all names starting with 2 and so on. One solution is to number with leading zeros such as 01, 02 … 09, 10, 11… and so on but this will only work if there are always less than 100 names in your selection. If you could have more than 100 names, then you should name them 001, 002 and so on that will work up to 999 records.