In our office we have an overall job number with sub-numbers for different components of the job (e.g. 1234.00 is the main billing number, 1234.10 would be the sales office, 1234.20 would be the interiors of a duplex within the project).
I prefix all IDs for the action item, submittals and RFIs with the two digit suffix of the sub-job number. For example, 10-RFI-03 would be the ID for RFI 3 regarding the sales office, 20-096000-01 would be a submittal for the duplex. This way there are not multiple RFI-03’s for a given project in the database.
I typically let Newforma manually number the transmittals, but this approach could be used there as well.
I’m interested in hearing other ideas.