User-Defined Fields

In addition to lookup and cross-reference tables, there may be data that, while not cross-referenced or converted, is required by trading partners. One example is a customer-assigned vendor number that might be required in all invoices and shipment notices sent to that customer. The vendor number could certainly be hard-coded into the appropriate XSLT stylesheets. However, it would be much more user friendly if there were a user-defined field where it could be maintained in the application's customer information subsystem. Similar information might need to be stored for each ship to location and each line item of a purchase order. For example, a UPC number might be the primary item identifier used to cross-reference against the item numbers used internally. But there may be one or more secondary identifiers that need to be captured and sent back to customers on invoices and purchase orders. I know it sounds like overkill, but it is common practice.

There are examples beyond just the traditional procurement cycle. State and federal agencies may assign organizations identifiers for certain types of regulatory compliance. If compliance data needs to be reported electronically, having fields for the identifiers in your own company record would be much easier than hard-coding them in your XSLT stylesheets.