1914346 - ID of Documents are Created Out of Order or there are Gaps in Document IDs

Some documents (for example Sales Orders or Contracts or Purchase Order) have document IDs that do not reflect the chronological order of creation.

You may also see gaps in document numbering, even if you have not deleted any document.

SAP Business ByDesign

This behavior can be reproduced by normally creating documents (for example Contracts or Sales Orders or Purchase Order) in sequence.

You may notice that sometimes the system will use a new document ID that is not sequential. Example:

Contracts Creation:
Sept-13 Contract 81 was created by the system.
Sept-14 Contract 76 was created by the system.

For performance reasons the system uses a pre-selected pool of ID numbers. technically this means that a memory buffer will reserve a certain number of ID's.

The number range object used for the documents (Contract or Sales Order) in the system uses the memory buffer. When the system buffers a number range object, it does not update numbers individually in the database but reserves a present group of numbers (depending on the number range object) in the database the first time a number is requested.

The system makes these numbers available to the application server in question. The following numbers can then be taken directly from the application server buffer. New numbers are not used in the database until the application server buffer has been used up. As there are more than one application servers available, the numerical sequence will not reflect the (chronological) insert sequence because the numbers are buffered separately on the individual hosts.

This kind of definition could lead to the following symptoms:
- Gaps (jumps) occur when allocating internal numbers
- The number assignment does not reflect the insert sequence.

This is the expected behavior of the system.

Sequence; Sales Order ID; Gap in Purchase Order; Good and Service Receipt , KBA , sales orders , numbering , document number sequence , AP-SLO , Sales Order Processing , AP-CCP-CC , Customer Contract , AP-SLO-SO , Sales Order , SRD-CRM-ORD , Orders & Contracts , Product Enhancement