Purchase Orders Inventory Tracking of Single Items and Kits or Assemblies - Help!

[cbarning]

Hi,

We've been using Filemaker Pro 5.0 invoice templates since 2002 and our business grew out of the limitations of this version. So we finally upgraded this past month to 8.5. Mostly everything went well, I got rid of the repeating fields from the original solution, we got FedEx integrated with FedEx Ship manager using ODBC and a little help from one of their programmers. Importing of orders from our PHP/MySQL shopping cart and more and the old FM db's were upgraded without any real issues.

But I'm having a problem getting inventory to work with the company requirements. I'll try to explain.

The majority of the products we sell are sold individually, but we also package some of those items into kits. So when an item or a kit is sold it must be taken out of inventory.

So I figured the best way to take inventory of single items and kits after the item was sold and entered into into the line items table of the purchase order would also have it write to a Transaction table where each item and items in kits could be entered and then a simple equation could be done to figure out inventory for that item.

The two issues I'm having is I cannot get a single line item to write to the transaction table when it's being entered into the Orders Line Item table and I have no clue how to have filemaker identify that an item is a kit when it's entered into the line item and how to get each of the items in the kit to write to the transaction table.

I have also provided a screenshot of the relationships. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Relationship Screenshot

[Søren Dyhr]

First off it isn't manditory to interconnect all TO's poke into Harris paper here:

http://www.digfm.org/ref/FM7_key_concepts.pdf

...and learn from it that the RG isn't an ERD!

Then to you question ...you can choose to solve it with a recursive structure:

http://jonathanstark.com/recursive_data_structures.php

Well he provided us with a template as well:

http://www.jonathanstark.com/downloads.php#inventory_example

--sd

[cbarning]

Thanks, hopefully this will give me a better understanding and be able to figure this out.