Thanks very much SRB. Just followed your advice and it worked a treat.

Thanks for your reply DanaH1976 . We've gone with the identity function.

In answer to your queries as to why I need to do it :-

Basically, this is what the system is doing.

Transactions are stored in a table called Transactions. This...

Thanks Kenneth. That's what I had found but was hoping someone had discovered an undocumented  workaround.

Sorry guys. I was barking up the wrong tree.

It was complaining about another field. Because I was creating a table "on the fly" one of the values I was using...

Took your advice in the end Dinesh and went with IDENTITY.

There doesn't seem a way to do it as I wanted to. Thanks anyway.

Yes.

Thanks for your reply Dinesh.

I don't want to use identity fields. I want to do it programmatically.

I was thinking more of starting of with a value (a variable) of...