Hi Jeff

First, I much appreciate your response.
It confirms what I was afraid of, that there was no what I call "nice" way of doing it.

I can do what you suggest if I make the WebService call parameter a string and the do the explicit Move (Number(sBatchIdNum)) to nBatchIdNum.

My preferred method would be to have the WebService parameter defined as a Number, directly communicating to the user of the WS what is required.
It strikes me that for WebServices, it would be nice if the processing of the call parameters did not raise an error in a popup box but instead set some properties that the program could check and decide what to do with them.

Again, thanks Jeff