Creating account numbers

[meredunne]

Hi All,

I have an excel spread sheet that lists all our our customer's business names in column D. I need to do a formula that will create an account number for each customer using the first 5 letters of the business names, excluding special characters, followed by a 4 digit numeric number. EG: A & B Flooring would need to have an account number of ABFLO0001.

 

[bbott]

Welcome to the board.

How many special characters do you need to account for? Using your example above and assuming company names start in A2, enter this in B2 and copy down.

=LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2," ",""),"&",""),5)&TEXT(COUNTIF($B$1:B1,LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2," ",""),"&",""),5)&"*")+1,"0000")

 

[Rick Rothstein]

I have an excel spread sheet that lists all our our customer's business names in column D. I need to do a formula that will create an account number for each customer using the first 5 letters of the business names, excluding special characters, followed by a 4 digit numeric number. EG: A & B Flooring would need to have an account number of ABFLO0001.

What determines what the 4-digit number should be?

 

[gaz_chops]

Maybe

=UPPER(LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1," ",""),"&",""),5))&TEXT(ROW(A1),"000#")

 

[meredunne]

bbott that worked perfectly! Thank you so much! One quick questions, where/can I add UPPER into the formula somewhere?

 

[bbott]

Like so:

=UPPER(LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2," ",""),"&",""),5))&TEXT(COUNTIF($B$1:B1,LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A2," ",""),"&",""),5)&"*")+1,"0000")

But be aware that this formula will only account for ampersands. Any other special characters would be included.

 

[meredunne]

Hi Rick, in theory, I need it to change if that exact combo is already used...so...if I have 5 business that start with CARPE, it would need to recognize and change from CARPE0001; CARPE0002; CARPE0003. Possible?

 

[meredunne]

Thank you, bbott. I was able to include ' & - based off of your original post (though I'm still learning, so it did take me a second lol)