Job Order Form in Access 2000

[L. T. Portella]

Our small office needs to develop a job order form (invoice with details)
for our customers (about 40). they come in almost daily and request we
perform certain jobs for them according to their specifications and they
leave a down paymeant. We could easily design a table in Word 2000 except
that at the end of the week we want to know how much we have received as
down payments by total of any one given customer and then of course the
grand total for all of them.

We are inclined to believe that Access 2000 may be the way to go but the
first question is: Can an access report be made to look like an invoice
which would then be able to give to the customer as a receipt for their down
payment as well as for subsequent payments.
Thank you
(e-mail address removed)

 

[L. T. Portella]

The invoice/receipt should have at least
1. Date
2. Number
3. Name and Address of the customer (I am already assuming that there will
be a table with this information for existing customers)
4. type of work to be done (typing, translation etc here again there would
be a table with the most common categories)
5. Instructions from the customer (probably a memo field)
6. Deadline date
7. Amount of down payment received
8. Subsequent amounts received
9. Documents received from Customer

I am sure there will be others but this will you a good idea of what I have
in mind.

At this point my question is: what is best? An access database with a nice
form or should I be looking to design a Word table to be used as a mail
merge document.
Thanks

 

[Larry Linson]

I'd suggest that the Access database will take a bit more time and effort to
implement, but will pay off in the long run because the information will be
more manageable. I just can't imagine doing this with Word tables if there
will be more than a handful of customers/invoices.

As a start with Access, I suggest "Access 2002 Step by Step" from Microsoft
Press. For a book that starts at the beginning, but goes deeper, "Special
Edition - Using Microsoft Access 2002" by Roger Jennings, from Que is good.
There are many other books.

It might, however, pay you to look around and see if you can use either some
of the forms in the Northwind traders sample database that comes with
Access, one of Access "wizards" for creating a DB, or one of the "templates"
that comes with Access, or are available at the Microsoft web site.

You might find some developer who has an application that you can license
for a reasonable sum, or have that developer to create one for your needs.

You may be able to handle this with as few as two tables (or two "major"
tables plus some related tables and lookup tables): Customers and Work
Orders.with a table related one-to-many to Work Orders for payment
information, and another also one-to-many for Documents received. You may
need lookup tables for such things as category of work, states of the US or
similar political subdivisions used in addresses of other countries, etc.

There is an Orders and Solutions sample database, in which the Orders
database could be a beginning point, if you can't find a Wizard, template,
or pre-written application. You can download it from
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/bapp2000/html/bap2000.exe.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP