Creating a Reference Number for Letters

I found it a bad practice in document archiving and management system using DATE as your reference. Although for others there is no problem encountered with this procedure, but on the long run this will create chaos in archiving documents.

Whether your organization writes two or more letters a day, use a unique reference number to identify a specific letter followed by a date when it was created or signed. This will make a correspondence archive-able and easy to manage.

Now, next question would be what format to follow?

There is no generic or ready made formatting (that I know) to be followed. The reference number format (or code) is on the discretion of the user which he finds informative, useful, and ease in quick referencing. You can use letters, numbers, or combination of both.

There are different techniques in doing this:

Numbers only
e.g. 001-055-01500
where as:
first three digits (001) are for department code,
second set (055) are for the employee code (or originator),
last digits (01500) are for unique (incremental) number

Alpha Numeric
e.g. ACT-EOF-01500
where as:
first three (ACT) are for department code,
second set (EOF) are for the employee's initials
last digits (01500) are for unique (incremental) number (notice that we still use numbers here)

In the above examples, we only have three elements: department code, employee's code (or the initiator), and unique number. Depending on your organizations need, you can add more elements to make your reference number more informative like project code, storage/file code, branch code, etc.

You can use hyphen (-) or slash (/) to separate the elements... or nothing at all (e.g. ACTEOF01500).

Just a couple of reminders:

• make it simple and short as much as possible
• must be consistent with other code format being implemented in your organization

We will discuss more about referencing and document handling next time. If you have some questions, clarifications, or anything related don't hesitate to drop some thoughts on the COMMENTS page.

By now... time to sleep. Goodnight!