I would have them all go directly into the master record table. You can setup the input form so when the user enters a bill that they can check for duplicate billing before saving.
You can also put some sort of approval field, so that you can filter bills that have not been final checked. I would not use temp tables to store data before merging. If there is a computer outage, the data is gone. The only times I use temp tables is to speed up processing for reports/exports, merging different data-sets, etc. Hope this helps. Dan Goldberg From: TFred Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 10:55 AM To: RBASE-L Mailing List Subject: [RBASE-L] - Master Records directly or through temp tables We are expanding our service billing capability and have become stuck on a good way to do this. Info can come from any number of computers, but most will be through 2-3 office machines. We currently check for typos, billing overlaps, and other errors. Right now everything goes directly to a master record table and then uses a form to ID a date range to check the selected bills. It works. The question becomes: as we allow more sites to enter their billing info is there a best way to do this with the least likelihood of problems? 1. Send all info directly to a master record table. This makes sure all the data is collected and problems are resolved later. Conflicts should be minimal but are likely as existing data is checked while rows get added. Final checker may not always see the problem. 2. Send data to temporary tables at each computer as it is entered and review the temp for problems, then append it up to the master table. The temporary nature of temp tables means stuff could happen before a temp is appended and data gets lost. At the same time, hopefully, the person entering will see a problem long before the final checker. Final checker still has to check for overlaps and errors in the master table. 3. Looked at regular tables for each computer but that seemed like asking for problems that temp tables solve. Any other methods people use? Tom Frederick Jacksonville, IL
