I've got myself in a muddle

[Bham45]

Donor/donations database: for the most part donations come from individuals, so somewhere in my db I've got "donor" equaling the Title, First Name, and Last Name. BUT now I've got some institutions donating and since the person writing the check might change but institution won't, I think in this case donor ought to equal the institution name.

But I can't figure out where/how to do this. I assume it should happen in the form where someone is entering donations that come in. If there's an institution donating, I'll enter the name of the institution and then add "Attn:" Title, First Name, Last Name. But how to not have this name become donor but the institution be the donor?

 

[plog]

You've not given me enough information to help you, but just enough information to make me highly suspicious of your table structure. I don't know how many tables you are working with, any table or field names or what your primary keys (if any) are.

Can you post your database or a screenshot of the table relationships view?

 

[Bham45]

Let me see if I can attach a screenshot of the relationships.

 

[smig]

You have many No-No in your tables structure:
No spaces and no special characters in names, only letters, numbers and _
Your PKs (Primary Keys) should be DonorID, DonationID, CampaignID
Your FKs (Foreign Keys) should be the same as the PKs

The relationships are OK.

The Donor in the Donations table is the Donor's PK, not the name.

On the form you put the fields exactly as in the table. If it's an institution don't put the name, only the institution. If you put a the name it will become another Donor.

on report you can put: "Attn:" Title, First Name, Last Name

 

[plog]

Your tables are fine. What smig has pointed out are essentially spelling errors, something you should aim to fix, but nothing atrocious.

My suggestion is to determine how big of an issue this is to you. If you want to be able to include institutions with contacts that could change, then you need another table--'Contacts'.

It would sit to the left of Donors and one Donor could have many Contacts. This would mean moving a lot of data currently in Donors to the Contacts table (First Name, Last Name, Greeting, etc). It would also require that every individual who is a donor to become a contact and belong to Donor. So all individuals would now be in Contacts even if they were themselves a donor.

 

[smig]

I realy suggest you fix wh as t I pointed out now.
It will be much more work trying to fix it later.

Having a Contacts table as Plog suggested will solve you the issue of multiple donators as under the same institution.
Copying the data from the existing table to the new one is not an issue.