How do I designate "same household"?

A

April K

Here is my question:

I have a main table that contains the complete contact
information for each stakeholder. This includes: name,
address, city, state, zip, phone, etc... What I need to
find is an easy way of designating when more than one
person is from the same household or organization.

For instance Jeff Jones and Tom Smith might both reside at
1234 Lincoln Way, No Where, US 55555. Currently, they
would both be entered into the database as individual
records. This generally works well for large companys &
organziations when recieving separate letters, invites,
notices, but for a property owner of a residence or small
business, several pieces of the same mail can be very
annoying.

What I would like to do is find a way to designate them as
being in the same household so that when we send out a
newsletter or invite - only one is sent to the address,
but is addressed to all of the household members. Any
thoughts....

Thanks in advance for your help.

~April
 
J

jwm

Create a family ID field upon which you can group, a yes/no field labeled
"Mail To," and check the one that you want to use as the mailing address.
 
M

Mike Painter

jwm said:
Create a family ID field upon which you can group, a yes/no field labeled
"Mail To," and check the one that you want to use as the mailing address.

That's a great solution but can lead to problems unless you hand crank the
family ID field.
You could mail to occupant in this case but you might want Tom Jones and
Jeff Smith in one case and Tom and Mary Smith in another.
It also assumes that the addresses are *written* the same.
1234 First Street for Tom and 1234 1st st for mary is very common.

If its small I do a duplicate query on the address, delete one duplicate and
change the other to a concatanated name of some sort. Then I sort by last
name , city and state to find most of the ones with the same address written
differently.

Worth doing if important and the database is small.
Mid size it's probably best (unless you are sending first class or don't
value your time) to farm it out to a mailing house that has the expensive
software to CASS certify. Then removing duplicates is easy.
Large and it's worth getting the CASS ability in house.

Yes you can do this in Access but it is reinventing the wheel and will be
expensive and time consuming just to aquire the ability to CASS certify on
an Access platform.
 

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