Part of the secret sauce I believe. It was probably set back in the days of 13 character item codes and never reset when they extended to 52. I think the only option would be to change the selection to Description and see if that helps, but I know it will separate some items that normally need to be reported together and will make life a little harder for you. So you may have to resort to stored templates in My Reports if it becomes a large problem.

Thanks Richard,

Yes, I think the inventory item display on report screens was originally a concatenation of the item number and description, which looked pretty awful because of the varying length of item numbers, but perhaps worked better if it only cut off the tail end of the description.

In my experience, most smaller companies use vendor's item / catalog numbers, rather than generating their own.

If Sage approached the situation from a 'big company' perspective where the Sage 50 user had a choice of item number, 13 characters would seem like loads of room, since even without using both upper and lower case letters, one could have 170,581,728,179,578,208,256 different inventory item numbers, and the old versions of Sage 50 used to crash at 65534 items.