What are impacts of using fewer digits in accounting flexfield segment that the max allowed in the v

What are impacts of using fewer digits in accounting flexfield segment that the max allowed in the value set?  I have never seen this but customer is considering this approach.

Using fewer values will complicate ASCII sort and specifying ranges, impact on cross validation rule and FSG report definitions.
Some customer segment values have leading zeros. When truncated in excel exports, which values are zero padded left and which values are less than max allowed
Have not seen any implementations using less that max.

Thank you.