services wanted Business Tracker Needs Tweaked $$

[philfox]

I’m looking for someone that can do a few tweaks to FMP Business Tracker. I run a Music Instrument Repair shop and have found FMP BT to do almost everything I need to do in it’s downloaded form. I’ve been working with it since it came out and have either botched something up or am missing something. I’m running out of time on the project and am willing to pay someone to tweak the download version of Business Tracker to a point at which I can take over and do the “dummy” tasks of renaming tables and graphics and such. I believe my hang up is in the relations area. HEEEEEEEEELLLP.

[stanley]

Texasmusicdoc:

Welcome to the Forums.

Please don't double-post. Your other post was deleted.

Having said that, if you could provide some more details, I'd be glad to take a look at the problem. Specifically, what are you trying to get FMBT to do, that it doesn't already do?

-Stanley.

[philfox]

I’ve re-titled many of the table names on the interface page but left the table titles alone in the “Define Database” area just in case there are scripts that depend on the original titles for navigation. I’ve re-formated some of the fields into pop-ups for quicker data entry.

When I create an invoice, the products line item area works great and BT knows which Contacts belong to which Companies , which is flawless. While generating an invoice, I’m trying to use the “Contacts” , “First Name” field to bring forth the rest of the “Contact’s” information and the “Company” to which the “Contact” belongs. BT retrieves the “Company” data great, but sometimes navigates to the proper “Contact” table and brings back the first record in the list instead of the record that matches the data in the “Contacts” , “First Name” field.

[stanley]

Texas:

FMBT can be a bit tricky to deal with, because it stores data in places which can seem pretty obtuse to the beginner. For example, a contact's phone numbers & email addresses are not stored in the contact record, they are stored in the "Number" table.

In the current invoicing system, you select a company, and then you can select any contact from that company. That system works well - and when you select a contact, you're linking via the contact's ID Number, which is the proper way to do it. Now, the relationship already exists, so to show data from the contact, you just need to know where to find the data. Some of the general data is available from the "Contact" table; some from the "Number" table, etc.

You need to take a good look at the relationship graph - I know, it may look like spaghetti to you - because all the data is already at your fingertips, and you just need to figure out how to extract it for your purposes.

For example, if you want to put a contact's email address into the invoice, put this field in the invoice: "Number EMAIL::Number". For the contact's primary phone number, it's "Number PRIMARY::Number". The designers of FMBT broke the data down in an extremely logical & flexible way, so that you could always get the data you want - it's just hard to grasp at first.

Hope that helps.

-Stanley