How addresses are stored

Addresses in this system are not one long line of text. Every address — a customer’s billing address, a pickup, a delivery — is held as the same eight parts.

Line	What it holds	Labelled on screen
1	Company	Company
2	Apartment / unit / suite	Address Line 2 (Apt, Unit, Suite)
3	Street number	Street Number
4	Street name	Street Name
5	Suburb	—
6	City	City / State
7	Postcode	Zip Code
8	Country	—

The on-screen labels above are from a customer’s address in Accounts. Other screens label some of these lines differently, or do not show them — the booking form, for example, shows two boxes rather than eight (see below).

Why the number is separate from the street

This is the part that surprises people, and it is deliberate.

Consider a hospital campus, an industrial park, or an airport. The delivery is to Building 4 at 120 Airport Drive. If the street number and street name sat in one box you would be forced to write something like “Building 4, 120 Airport Drive” and hope whoever reads it works out which number is the building and which is the street.

Keeping them apart means:

• Line 1 carries the site or company name
• Line 2 carries the unit, suite or floor
• Line 3 carries the street number on its own
• Line 4 carries the street name

So a driver, a label and an invoice can each show the right piece. Sorting and searching also work properly, because a street number is not buried inside a sentence.

You do not have to fill them in one by one

When you book a job you do not see eight boxes. You see two:

• “Pickup address or business name…” — type here and pick the match. The system splits what it finds across the lines for you.
• “Company, Unit, Flat, Floor, Building etc…” — the part a street lookup cannot know.

That second box is the campus case made concrete. The lookup can find 120 Airport Drive; it cannot know you want Building 4. So the street part is searched, and the site part is typed.

That is the trade being made: structured underneath, two boxes on top. The separate fields are what make the structure possible; the search is what stops you paying for it.

On the booking form these appear as Extra From Info and Extra To Info, one for each end of the job.

Where you see the pieces again

Because the parts are stored separately, they can be recombined differently depending on what is being produced. Invoices, for example, can show the street number and street name as one line or as two, and can show suburb, city and postcode together or apart — without anyone re-typing an address.

That is also why an invoice can carry just the pickup postcode and just the delivery postcode as their own columns. Those are line 7 of each address, available on their own precisely because the address was never one lump of text.

Related

• Put a customer’s details on an invoice