I am a distributor.  My customers can also be distributors.  They can also be large companies with many locations and hundreds of contacts, like Pepsi.  Is it wiser to keep the "Accounts" table as is with only one "bill to" and "ship to" address and really treat accounts as locations, or create a separate table for "ship to" addresses and associate them with an account relationally?  Has anyone else with this sort of customer relationship found a succesful solution.  I simply don't see the efficiency of having to store the same contact and billing information for 50 different locations for all my larger accounts. For instance accounting personnel, regional and district managers etc are connected to many locations under the same "account".

Ben,

 

We have had multiple customers insert an Address table in a multitude of ways successfully (Either themselves, or hired us to do it for them), and it is certainly a viable solution, the questions is, are the addresses the only thing that change between locations? If so, then Yes, I would recommend adding an "Address" table and start relating accounts, it allows flexibility when creating invoices and helps keep all the information more neat.

 

An alternative I have also seen deployed is a "Locations" table that gives the user the ability to edit a bit more of the information, like regional managers, facility managers, etc.  Used more often in cases where Regional managers handle inventory at all their stores. 

 

Thanks,

Jonathan Hogle