Hi all. I have been working on a solution for tracking monthly payments for various accounts. The problem I was having was that there is a 10 day grace period on payments, so a payment due on September 29 might be paid in November, but should still be associated with the month of September.

I read over quite a few posts. Looked at various calendar solutions, and came up with something that seems to be functional, but I would like some feedback and thoughts. Soren (good man that he is) is looking over the project as a whole, but I am curious what others think of the basic idea here.

At first, I was going to create record for every month on a "Months" table and then just associate payments with that month, but that seemed a bit cumbersome to have to create records for every year.

Then, after the manner of some of the calendars I was looking at, I was going to use global fields to sort of create a monthly view, but this did not solve my problem of keeping a payment associated with a month, when it might be paid in another month.

Finally, I sort of combined the two approaches. Using the global table, one can browse to whatever month needed. When a payment is created in that month, a "Month" record is created as well in my "Months" table, which I use to track payments. This solves having to create records for an entire year by sort of automating the creation of months.

It looks like it will work. I have not put it live yet, as I wanted to get some views on what I am doing. Will this function over the long term? Anyone see any potential problems?

I have attached a file with the basic idea in place.

This is sort of a conglomeration of a few ideas I read in this forum, and one post on Dwayne Wright's blog, and a script from SeedCodes free calendar for changing the months.

MonthlyPayments.zip

Edited August 20, 200916 yr by Guest

You've asked me to make contributions to this in the private section, but where were we debating this originally? The private thread assumed some sort of debate ahead!

--sd

You have payment date, isn't it?

And you have determined date of payment.

So - if difference between the dates is bigger than 10 days, then client must pay extra. If less - payment is in time and is OK.

I suppose that you have some status field - Paid, Delayed or so on.

You need to make simple calculation Status=If (date paid-date due) <10;"Paid";"Delayed").

Going forward you can add field for amount of payed and see +/- in your relationships with client.

And the best is to make mentioned fields and write a script triggerd from field "Amount payed", like this

If Is Empty Date paid, set field Date Payed=...today or special date, else Exit script.

I recommend to add some Custom dialog before changin conten in field Date Payed and Amount Payed.