I am trying to do similar.
In out Accounts module we have the account name, and also account number, which is a custom field. We are looking at trying to do it so in the other modules, when you do the related to: lookup for accounts that it will show the account name:account number instead of just the account name.
So we could have one customer name with multiple accounts, and so it’s difficult to differentiate which of the accounts we want.
Not really got very far at all beyond thinking about it. But it’s on my list of things to do. So insterested in any ideas anyone can come up with.
Almost tempted to merge them so the account name always includes the account number, but doing this via a shell script so when we import everything the account name is actually account name:account number and there is a separate field for original account name, that we will keep but not show.