Invoicing System Help!

[RWX]

Hello everyone.

I'm working on a project that involves an invoicing-like system. Let me explain. The company I'm working for is an acting studio. They teach acting classes, hold workshops, etc. I'm about to start building the class enrollement/management side of things and am a little uncertain of how best to handle this aspect of the solution.

I have a database containing client records. These are the students. I have another database containing teacher records. I plan to create a Classes database with all of the relevant class information and then a join file to link Students and Classes. Teachers will be linked directly to their Class records. So far this seems easy enough. Here are some of the issues giving me problems:

1) In addition to classes, students may also buy a "Membership." This gives them discounts, etc. How do I handle this? Should Memberships be a separate file? Or should I included them in the Classes file and treat that file as a products database?

2) Most classes have a fixed start and end date. Some, however, are on-going. Ultimately I plan to pull attendance information, etc. out of the join file linking Students and Classes. Is there any reason to keep on-going classes in a separate file? I can't see why...

3) If a student buys several classes at the same time, or signs up for a membership when signing up for classes, that student gets a discount. Is the join file enough? Or should I add an additional file, something like an invoice, so that a Student record is linked to an Invoice record, an Invoice record is linked to multiple join file records, and the join file records are linked to the relevant Class (ie: Product) records?

4) How should I handle discounts in the form of coupons? The company frequently publishes discount coupons and would like to track which coupons are most effective. Therefore a simple discount field seems inadequate. Should coupons be a separate file too?

Any thoughts on these issues would be most appreciated. Overall it seems a pretty standard Client-Invoice-Product solution. However, I just want to make sure that some of the other details don't cause me problems down the road.

Thanks for your help!

-Rob

[Anatoli]

Simple advice -- everything should be in separate files.