References are unique

Annapurna will not allow references to be duplicated and this is built into the database design so it cannot be circumvented.

We also know that some customers reuse references or job trays and it becomes a pain to have that rejected because the reference has already been used so Annapurna tries to be helpful.

For example customer sends a job with reference Stock.  That will be accepted on the first time. On the second time, it will be rejected as "already been entered".  At this point, Annapurna does something clever. If the previous order for Stock has been completed then it will automatically modify the reference to Stock-ddmm where ddmm is the day and month and continue.  If the job is tried to be entered again under the reference Stock then the automatic modification will happen again but this time it will be rejected because Stock-ddmm is now in the database.  Note that for this to happen, the previous job has to be completed so if the original job with reference of Stock has NOT been completed then the automatic modification will not take place.

We are currently making an update for the lab to revert back to each reference to be unique ie to turn off the above behaviour. This will be in Settings / Job Entry / Checks.