Guidance integrating accounting with inventory

[Bob Schwenkler]

Hi All,

I'm looking for some advice from more experienced users regarding a database I'm currently building. This is my first time working with FM and it's going well, but this particular aspect is a little trickier and I want to try as well as I can to not paint myself into a corner in the future here.

I'm developing a complete accounting and inventory (as well as contacts and promotions tracking) database for my record company. We need to be able to track our cash flow, and alongside of this need to track our inventory using actual unit numbers (not just inventory cost).

These seem like two distinct sets of data which would want two separate tables for storage/tracking. I'm curently using scripts to format and enter financial data into the general ledger, and I'm not sure if I should just create another table for unit tracking and incorporate the data entry for this table into the same scripts.

As it is, for invoices, I already have data being entered into an invoicing table and then shuffled over to the general ledger.

One idea I had was to change the invoicing table into a more general inventory tracking table and doing all my unit count tracking here, I could continue to base my invoices off of this table while using the table to also track all other forms of ingoing and outgoing stock.

Any help/suggestions? I'm sure there's a lot of ways to do this and I'm also sure it's been done many times before. Any advice would probably be helpful. Thanks!

[Søren Dyhr]

Since you're intermediately skilled, shouldn't it be throwing you out in the deep end of the pool ...by leading you to this:

http://jonathanstark.com/recursive_data_structures.php

...alternatively if you really should scale upwards!

http://filemakerdevelopment.com/downloads/FSA_Oct_2006.pdf

--sd

[Bob Schwenkler]

Cool, that's really helpful in terms of inventory DB structure, I'll definitely look into that for what I'm working on.

I'm not sure what the PDF linked to is referencing, it looks like an overview for a presentation, but there doesn't seem to be any in depth material to reference.

Any suggestions or comments in regards to inventory and accounting side by side? Would I do best to consider them to be separate systems and have them operate in tandem when needed?

[Søren Dyhr]

Any suggestions or comments in regards to inventory and accounting side by side? Would I do best to consider them to be separate systems and have them operate in tandem when needed?

Comment gave what I consider a proper answer to this yesterday:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showpost.php?post/324112/

This is the normalization POW - However must accounting systems abide to fiscal demands ... and to get an accounting solution acknowledged by authorities could be a somewhat daunting task.

What I see in my neck of the woods is CRM which integrates with Dynamics via ODBC.

--sd