How to manage, update, and remove IOU data

[emilyebba]

Hi,

I would like to request some advice about how to display and manage some information. Ultimately I want to be able to find out current IOU's and be able to add/remove as necessary

I have a database tracking customers and payments. On my payments form I have a tick box if an IOU is filed. Since the payment form is an invoice/receipt I dont want to change it after it is created.

So I was thinking that I would have a separate table/form to keep track of all Cutomers who have filed IOU's (with CustID, and a tickbox Yes for IOU filed). Then I could create a monthly report and find out all my active IOU's.

BUT....how to remove the IOU classification when they pay? Go back to the table/form and delete the entry? Is that the best way? I dont necessarily need to keep track of past IOUs filed as I thought it would make the database to big and I keep paper records of that for history if I need to go back and find that out.

I would appreciate any advice from those that have more expertise with managing this kind of information.

Thanks!

 

[Galaxiom]

Best to do this with transactions rather than deleting when it is cleared.

Have you considered creating an IOU product and selling it to them?

It would need to be excluded from the sales report but that should not present too much trouble. It would also be posted against the cash ledger instead of inventory.

 

[wmphoto]

I would say that unless you're a multinational corporation, databases are never as big as you worry that they'll be and accessing the data is much easier than searching paper records, it's always best to think, I might need to refer to this later (for example maybe several years down the line you may wonder if the amount of time it takes people to pay on IOUs is increasing or decreasing). Even if you take hundreds of IOUs, we're probably only talking of an increase in database size measured in kiloBytes.

Might I suggest, instead of checkboxes, you use two date fields, one for date filed and one for date cleared. If the filed field is populated it means an IOU was filed, and if you want to ensure the payment form isn't changed as a result of this, you could set the checkbox on your form to display a tick, if the date is populated, and if the cleared field is populated, it means the IOU is no longer outstanding.

It's probably a good idea to consider IOUs as a kind of product, the more you can do with the tables already in place the better

Also I would suggest that if you were to create a separate table for IOU's filed, the checkbox would be redundant, as the customer's mere presence in the table indicates they have filed an IOU.