System Maintenance > Auto-Set Next Available Donor ID

System, Auto-Set Next Available Donor ID

As you have probably noticed, DonorQuest automatically assigns an ID number when you add a new donor. To do this, DonorQuest keeps track of the largest ID number currently in use. When you add a new donor, the new donor gets this largest ID number plus one, and DonorQuest then keeps track of the new "largest" ID number.

Selecting Auto-Set Next Available Donor ID from the System menu will tell DonorQuest to look at all donors in your database, searching for the largest ID number in use. Once this is found, DonorQuest will set the Next Available Donor ID to this number, plus one. So the next new donor you add will be assigned an ID larger than any existing donor. This is convenient since having only new, never-before-used donor ID's always allocated means that ordering your donors by their ID will also put them in the chronological order in which they were added.

The Configure, Program Settings dialog in DonorQuest allows you to set the Next Available Donor ID to anything -- even 1. This would cause DonorQuest to begin recycling the old ID numbers of deleted donors. DonorQuest would never assign an ID number that is currently in use by an existing donor, so if the Next Available ID is actually in use, DonorQuest would add one to it, check again, and repeat until it found an unused ID. But this practice of recycling old ID's is not recommended and totally unnecessary since the range of ID numbers in DonorQuest goes up to 999,999,999,999. Providing access to the Next Available Donor ID in the Program Settings dialog is really intended to allow you to set the ID allocation forwards. For example, if you have just imported all the data from your old fundraising system into DonorQuest, and your old system had used ID's 1...45,327, you might choose to set the Next Available ID in DonorQuest to 50,000 just to make a clean break with the old system. That way, looking at any donor record you would be able to immediately know whether it came from your old system, or was created new in DonorQuest.