I like using the first few letters of the vendor's name because that way when you sort by vendor number it is in alphabetical order.

I've always suggested using a systematic way of assigning vendor or customer numbers that makes it easy to guess what the id is.

For example for businesses I will take the first three letters of the first word in the company name and the first letter of a subsequent word in the name and then add a number to distinguish if there is a resulting duplication.

Superior Business Forms =  SUPB01

Super Budget Autos = SUPB02

Sage Software = SAGS01

For individual names I take the first three letters of the last name and the first letter of first name and then add a number.

Tom Rogers = ROGT01

Trudy Rogers = ROGT02

Sally Wilson = WILS01

As BL indicated this tends to make the vendor numbers somewhat alphabetically sorted.

Thanks for the responses.  I think we will use something similar in renumbering vendors.

And when renumbering always make sure to do a backup first.  The renumber utilities are dangerous.  One mistake and you can merge a whole lot of vendors into a single account.  There is no undo without a backup if you mess up.

Thank you for the tip to do a backup first.  We should be doing backups periodically anyway.