I am a wedding Photographer setting up a FileMaker 9 database to keep track of contact information for my clients.

The Wedding is the event with several contacts associated with the wedding. I have the Bride, Groom, Bride's Parents, and Groom's parents. I need contact info for all of them - address, email, phone. In the bride's info I also need records of payments that she has made and some notes, and the status of her album order.

Should I set up one giant record with fields for everyone, or should I make some sort of relational structure that has a master Event with sub records.

I will want to do searches for contacts that have not ordered anything. Then email, write, or call them with reminders.

I hope that I am saying this right. I really need some ideas on how to design this database. Please give me some direction. I am playing with Bento also. Is that a better way for me to do this?

Kevin Hawkins

I would suggest having a Contact table that has a generic (id, name, email, address, phone, cell) strucutre, then have a "Wedding Party" table that has contact ids for bride, groom, bride father, groom mother, best man, etc.

I would think the payment information would be associated with the wedding party, isn't it common for the bride's father to pick up all expenses?

While Bento is interesting, I think FileMaker is more powerful, which you might find you need as this solution grows. Also, FileMaker can interact with Aperture via some plug-ins, I believe; which might be useful to you.

Here's an example demonstrating how I suggest setting up the wedding party.

For you invoices, you would probably also want a line items table to itemize what you're charging, that's a pretty standard setup for invoicing.

Weddings.fp7.zip

I think I would make it a little bit simpler:

Weddings.fp7.zip