A unique number assigned to users that identifies them to the entity establishing a relationship of some kind. A bank account number and credit card number are common examples. An account number can be assigned to individuals or organizations, including employees, customers, vendors and contractors.
Numeric or Alphanumeric
An account number may be all numeric, or it may contain a combination of alphabetic characters and numeric digits. However, in the following example, the account number is all numeric, but it includes state and city codes. Such a field would be classified as characters to the program so that the individual subfields can be searched independently. If the field were defined as numeric only, the program would not be able to independently search on city and state. See
string and
account.
EXAMPLE NUMERIC ACCOUNT NUMBER (14 Bytes)
Positions Coded
Subfield in Field as
State code 1-2 01-50
City code 3-6 01-9500
Customer # 7-14 00000001-99999999