A consequence of company growth is that not only does the chart of accounts grow larger and less intuitive, but also the actual lengths of account numbers tend to grow longer as well. Companies want to be able to report by account, department, location, and so on, which results in a proliferation of segments added to the main account number and can create very long accounts. Dynamics GP can accommodate an account number as long as 66 characters. The longest I've seen used in practice was of 27 characters and even that was unwieldy. Most users only need a portion of that length for their day-to-day work.
This presents a problem because very long account numbers won't fit into the account number field on most screens. For this recipe, we'll look at how Dynamics GP provides a solution to this in the User Preferences area.