# Weekly Review: Long Account Number Pitfalls

- URL: https://dynamicaccounting.net/weekly-review-long-account-number-pitfalls/
- Date: 2010-02-11
- Topics: Tips & Hidden Features, Reporting & BI, General Ledger & Financials
- Type: original article

I’ve gotten questions from people over the years about long account  
numbers/lots of segments, so I thought I would put together a short  
list of the pitfalls of very large account numbers.

The longest GL account number I’ve worked with in GP is 27 digits, 8  
segments. This is different from the account framework which may be  
large to accomodate changes but most companies have a much smaller  
chart of accounts.

When you have an account number of that size, some of the pitfalls in GP are:

1) You have to activate horizontal scroll bars in User Preferences and  
you end up scrolling left an right to see the entire account.

2) Many of GP’s default reports aren’t setup for accounts of that size  
and you’ll need to modify posting reports for all modules and GL  
related reports.

3) You’ll do a lot of resizing in Smartlists just to fit what you want on the screen.

4) You shouldn’t see too many performance issues in GP but you may see  
serious slowdowns in FRx. This is especially true when using trees or  
reports with heavy account detail. Enterprise Reporting deals with  
large accounts and large datasets better, but the features are not  
identical between the two products.

5) Users will do a lot more searching on segments other than account  
number. Make sure you’ve got the other segments setup to be searchable  
in the account framework.

Originally Posted by Mark at [8/28/2006 09:51:00 PM](http://msdynamicsgp.blogspot.com/2006/08/weekly-dynamic-long-account-number.html "permanent link")