Need help with concept!

[jagilman]

I have been working on a re-write of a customers order entry and shipping program in Access 97. The old programmer had designed the order table to include the products.(the company only had 2 items to sell)

Now they have many items to sell and needed the addition of an order details table. So far no problem, but where I am running into questions is in the shipping area. They want the ability to ship some of the order items now and some later. The customers credit card will only be charged for what is shipped. I am wondering if the best way to handle the situation is to generate a new order for the items that did not ship (the credit card transaction has about 5 fields that need to be stored in addition to shipping info)

Has anybody worked with somthing similar? The customer has no idea how they want to do it. I would just like to find an effective process that makes sense.

Thanks for the help!
[sig]<p>John A. Gilman<br><a href=mailto:gms@uslink.net>gms@uslink.net</a><br>[/sig]

 

[Ruairi]

how about adding a field like 'billedflag' to the order table. if an order is generated but not billed to the customer, set it to &quot;N&quot; or 0 or &quot;F&quot; or however you want to do it. When the order is shipped, go back and do your credit card transaction and set billedflag to &quot;Y&quot; or 1 or &quot;T&quot;. That way you will have one field that can quickly tell you if an order is completed or pending. [sig][/sig]

 

[jagilman]

The only trouble is that the second credit card transaction would need to overwrite the first one. However the flag to show which items were shipped is a must!
[sig]<p>John A. Gilman<br><a href=mailto:gms@uslink.net>gms@uslink.net</a><br>[/sig]

 

[MalcolmW]

An alternative to this would be a field that stores a Packing List id number for each order item id, which you could use as a basis for generating billing as well. [sig][/sig]

 

[Guest_imported]

What you are trying to do is actually very complex (..setting up the database tables is easy, the hard part is the recalc of tax,shipping, apply partial discounts on what was shipped.) Assuming that you take a logical approach and have, at minimum, an OrdersHeader and an OrdersItem table, you should be able to store in Items shipped,date shipped, tacking numbers in the OrdersItem and keep a ORDER status in the OrderHear Table (Shipped complete, Shipped Partial....).

The Recalc will get you! You can bet on it. I have done it.