UAN means Universal Account Number which has 12 digits and that has been allocated to every PF account holder.(Employees)
Whenever a Employee joins a Organization (Company) he/she will be allocated a new PF Account number and when the employee leaves the Organization and joins a new Organization he/she will be allocated again a new PF account different from the previous one.This used to be tedious process and it used to take a lot of time.
To simply this process, EPFO has brought in UAN. So now whenever a person leaves an organization and joins a new one,they just need to provide their UAN to the new Employer and the PF ID that will be created for the person at the new workplace would be tagged to the UAN.
To put in simple words,UAN is a number that would tag multiple PF account ID’s for a single member.