Hullo, I am trying to build a filemaker database for a rental company in Sydney - Australia. LaRetta pointed me to a great file by cobaltsky in another part of this forum for tips with searching a ran

[superfee]

Hullo,

I am trying to build a filemaker database for a rental company in Sydney - Australia. LaRetta pointed me to a great file by cobaltsky in another part of this forum for tips with searching a range of dates- he had a great setup for a hotel reservation program. I found this a fantastic help with my main problem, at the time, which was attempting to reserve my items for future dates, by searching for a range of dates on which other orders existed.

However before I proceed any further I'd appreciate some feedback as to whether I am attempting to reinvent the wheel.

As I have come from a background working with video rental databases I thought the main difference for this business would be that the rentals can be booked ahead of time and in lots of say 100 instead of just 1. Also you wouldn't want to identify each of these widgets individually, but just have say 500 Red widgets and 200 Blue widgets and 300 Yellow widgets and so on. So you may have 3000 items but only 15 different types. That is a customer would never request a specific widget - only a particular type of widget (of which there are 15 types).

When the customer rings you would want to enter the start date and end date that they are interested in hiring goods, and the database would spit out the quantities of each of the 15 types of widgets (less any orders that have already been booked over that period). This way when they say "100 red widgets please" we could say - "I only have 75 until Wednesday but then I can send the rest on Thursday".

You would also want to have the capacity to run reports to predict potential low stock periods, like a predictive min-max in inventory terms.

Hmmmm...also the database would have to be able to ODBC with MYOB. Has anyone had a successful integration with MYOB?

So if anyone has completed a similar database and has some tips on their solutions that would be great - especially keen to see what any local developers have already achieved before I go any further. What say you?

Cheers for the great advice you all dish out on this forum too!

superfee