Suffixes - Order and field advice

@Erin Kraft Goodness! So with your tentative plan you would enter it as John Smith, Jr, DO?

While you can set a default order to choose from, your donors will want what they prefer. While not heavily in medical field like you are I've encountered folks who want every degree/certification listed for their name and the flip side of those who just want Mr./Mrs. Academia maybe not quite as many suffix options.

You can set your default order for what is most used/what you hope is most used but IMO you have to use what constituent desires. For some that may be what's in Suffix 1 field, for others it may be Suffix 1 and Suffix 2. I don't see that you can limit it if you're going to have all types of options.
If you're using more than one Suffix field, remember you'll need to pull both fields for any merge documents that you run. And/or create naming formats that use them.

@Erin Kraft also a welcome to the community - we are a school so we don't have this issue and I'll share how I set our system up. Suffix1 is restricted to personal suffixes with no comma in front (Jr.; Sr.; III; etc.) and Suffix2 is restricted to professional suffixes with commas built in (, CPA; , DDS; , DMD). We order the table so personal suffixes are first and professional suffixes follow in alpha order. We would have the professional suffix options that our constituents would have requested.

Let us know what you end up doing!

@Erin Kraft
I like @Elizabeth Johnson's method of splitting personal and professional suffixes into their own tables. That will mean, of course, that most of your doctors will only have Suffix2's without a Suffix1, since most people aren't Juniors. I also second @JoAnn Strommen's experience that donors want what they want. Not medical donors, but we have military donors in our system – and some want the whole Col. (Ret.) added in their letter salutations ("Dear Col. (Ret.) James"), and others don't care to include it. Same with priests: some are very particular about their Very Rev. John Smith DD, OSB and others with the same status just want “Father Smith”.

For my small contribution, I'll add that according to formal ettiquette, you don't use Dr. and MD/DO/PhD together in an address - it's one or the other.

Here are some professional ettiquette resources:

When to Use Dr or PhD

Hierarchy of postnominal letters (religious, theological, academic, honorary, professional, military - in that order)

Another article on postnominal letter hierarchy

Order of credentials after a name