Where I work we have a database for memberships purchased for our organization. Our memberships expire yearly, and we have a field where we enter in the expiration date. However, unless someone goes into an expired record and changes the person's status from "member" to "expired member," an expired member can potentially still show up as a member. This can potentially be a problem when we do a count of all of our "member" records (since we turn the number over to our board of directors, it needs to be fully accurate).

Is there a way to trigger a field to deactivate at a certain date and time? Not that manually doing it is that much work, it just leaves a lot of room for error due to human forgetfulness.

No, but you can solve this by either having the report search for records that don't have an expired date, searching for those that DO and replace their Status prior to running the report, or by making the Status field a calculation that's determined by what's populated in the Date fields--then search on the Status (this last option will be an unstored calc, and can be problematic in some versions of FMP prior to 8.0v3).

Thank you, that helps a lot!