When you feed ZA into the User Defined Function, you get: 1270. However, the ZA is in the hundreds place. Therefore 1270 has to be multiplied by 100. Afterward, you add the numerics.

(1270*100) + 22 = 127022

I hope that helps. Please don’t hesitate to ask if you don’t understand something.

ELSE IF @alpha = 3
BEGIN
SET @jonos_left = (SELECT ((dbo.fn_base36(‘ZZ’) * 100 + 9) -dbo.fn_base36(@base36) * 100 + @Numeric_Left))

END

I thought about using Crystal Reports. I would have been happy to do so, but according to my previous poll, many folks aren’t fortunate enough to own it. In the future, I may supply Excel Spreadsheets for download since nearly everyone has it.

As for querying the other types of job order numbers, it would require a modified User Defined Function since they are not truly Base 36. Those do omit I & T so the calculations are different and more complicated. As I said, I was attempting to make this article as simple as possible for Admins who are relatively new to T-SQL.

Depending on the rate of growth (or shrinkage), your time remaining may be drastically effected. If you really wanted to get fancy it would be nice to have a single report (maybe Crystal?) that would show the estimated time remaining for all records. You could also display usage over previous time periods and show estimated end of available numbers based upon previous or expected percent growth. By using Crystal and supplying executable SQL code to make everything work, a complete novice could get their statistics. While my company does not use job numbers, it would be interesting to find out when we will run out of other records like sales orders and purchase orders.