we place orders for customers in an order database. when the products to fill the order arrive at out store, we send the order to a finance database where a shipping slip and an invoice is printed.

But, the order database still has the order, but it gets marked closed. I was thinking of having the order exported to finance, and then have the script return to the order database and have the order deleted because it has been filled. I have two problems:

1. i worry if the order does not export properly, and then the order is deleted, I will have no record of it.

2. I presently do not give rights to our sales people to delete orders in the order database, so can I have the script change the rights, delete the filled order, and restrict the right back to the original setting?

Or, maybe I should just leave everything the way it is. Has anyone had a similar situation, and if so, what would you recommend?

This kind of falls into the same topic as archiving. If you want to do it automatically, be very careful, because if something goes wrong, you can easily destroy your database. I suggest that if you want to export and delete records, do it on a periodic basis, like weekly, not after each individual invoice is closed.

My personal preference would be not to do this at all. Just mark the invoice closed as you are doing, and use this as a criterion in searching or relationships, so that only active invoices are displayed.

BTW, my philosophy on archiving is very simple: If the database gets too big, do a backup of the whole thing (which you are already doing, right?) and then delete the inactive records from the working database.