Fallacies of injecting business logic where it doesn't belong

[Zamdrist]

Anyone know of a position paper or thesis on the fallacies of
injecting business logic into a number sequence? For example, say you
have a number of clients for whom you do different sorts of work for,
and you want to distinguish between the different types of work, so
you give the case numbers a naming schema that reflects this, rather
than doing as I would think wiser, using data fields in a table to
draw those distinctions.

I don't think I am alone in this opinion, and I'm guessing somewhere
out there is a solid explanation of such a poor design plan.

Thanks