Invoices and Line Items

[raylenetaskoski]

I am creating a database for Conference Registrations that will keep the name of the attendee in one file, the items for which they can register in another and the actual charges and payment information (technically an invoice) in another.

The reason for this is that some attendees add things on to their registration at the last minute this seems to me to be the best way to accurately track payment and deposit information and actual numbers of attendees.

Seems straight forward on the surface, however for each event they have to register for there are two prices - a before certain date and after certain date price. Now, do I have to create a separate line item for the before and the after rate or is there some way I can get FMPro to do the math?

Currently I have my invoice set up like so:

Line_1_Quantity, Event (look up from another file), Line_1_Total.

In a perfect world I'd like to get filemaker to recognize the event chosen and based on the date I'm entering the registration form charge either the before or after price. Am I expecting too much?

ALSO, judging by the way I've set the invoice up (as noted above), is this odd? and will I have trouble making reports on how many people are coming to any particular events. I plan on making about 10 lines per invoice so I could continue on with "Line_2_Quantity, Event, Line_2_Total", etc. Is that retarded?

I've been using FMPro for about 8 years now and am completely self-taught. The problem I'm running into is that the books I read are either for entry level or experts. If I could find a template and disect it, that would be great, but I haven't found one yet.

Thanks for any help.

...raylene

[Kurt Knippel]

I would think that you would want the following structure.

Attendee.fp5

Event.fp5

Registration.fp5

Invoice.fp5 (optional)

Attendee.fp5 would store all the attendee's information. Event.fp5 would store all of the event's information including the pricing and date information. Registration.fp5 is really a line-item/join file between Attendee and Event, this would calculate the price based upon the date of registration. Invoice.fp5 is optional since you want to generate multiple types of invoices for each attendee, but for the most part this could come directly the Registration.fp5 file.

Assume that Event.fp5 contains the following fields:

EventID

Event_Date

LateRegistration_Date

LateRegistration_Price

EarlyRegistration_Date

EarlyRegistration_Price

Registration would contain the following calc:

Price = auto-entered calculation as follows:

Case (

Registration_Date <= Event::EarlyRegistration_Date, EarlyRegistration_Price,

Registration_Date > Event::EarlyRegistration_Date AND Registration_Date <= Event::LateRegistration_Date, LateRegistration_Price,

0.00

)

---

[raylenetaskoski]

That worked amazingly well and it was along the lines of what I was thinking needed to be done but I had no idea how to write it. Thanks. There's more though.

There are a total of 27 things people can sign up for at this conference (not including the Early & Late registration differentials). No one would sign up for more than 8 though, as they would overlap times, etc. so how do I make another line on the invoice? I tried just adding another line with "QUAN_line_2" and "TOTAL_Line_2" and it went all wonky on me.

Do you know of a simple invoice template that I could look at? Because if I see how it's built I'll be able to figure out mine (I hope).

I really appreciate the help.

...raylene

[Kurt Knippel]

The "sessions" that you can sign up for...are they priced seperately? If not then do not include them in this process. Add two additional files to the solution.

Session.fp5

Signup.fp5

Session.fp5 would store the information about the session itself, while Signup.fp5 would be the line-item/join file between Attendee.fp5 and Session.fp5.

If they are all priced seperately, then just expand the use of the other files to deal with each of them seperately. DO NOT include multiple sessions into a single registration record.