Rental Form

[Larryo]

All,

I want to create rental forms for our property management business. I have about 30 properties so I would want a data base that will identify the property and put the address and specifics on the rental form and other forms, use in rentup and vacating.

Then I would want to pull the tenant from a different data base so his information would be automatically shown on all the forms.

What is the best way to do this... pulling info from two different data bases, or perhaps combined into one, but have the ability to select the data once and it appears on all forms.

So, the end result would be:

Enter tenant into data base,

Select layout that has the forms in it (about 20 pages worth).

Somehow select the property info (address, contents, etc) for the property the tenant is renting.

Print for tenant.

Thoughts?

Thanks Larry

[efen]

In what "form" are the forms of this database? Are they records? Text on the FileMaker layouts?

[Ocean West]

Larry,

I am doing this exact same thing.

What I would recommend is to look at my post history you will find references to Script Master by 360Works and iText

This will allow you to created separate PDF's of each page / document of the rental package. The Plugin (free) will let you merge that into a single

PDF. It is faster than file maker's Append to PDF and the resulting PDF is smaller in size.

In the end you will have had the DATA from your database typed into the rental package.

If your contracts differer in clauses for property to property you may consider having a CLAUSE table that is a line items table and print from that

displaying only the clauses that is applicable to that property. So each property can have it's unique terms & conditions.

Another technique to merge data or pull data from different tables in to ONE table ( - it really depends on your data and schema ) but you could use

the Virtual List technique in order to grab all the data for output purposes. (that is another longer discussion)

If your forms are STOCK you may scan them and save them as a HIGH quality TIFF file and place it on the layout you could then place the text fields in their

appropriate places. Then just print or save the out put as PDF's

Remember to make sure your Schema can accommodate for the nature of the the business ( temporally ) people / tenants come and go so if you have say

an apartment complex the number of units may be fixed but the occupants will change over time. So some of the data points would be date driven Move in / Move Out

And you may be dealing with BOTH departing and new tenant at the same time so be carful not to paint yourself in to a corner. But allow you to show rental history.

Also you may wish to look up topics on the Party Model -

Properties management there is many parties that are involved with the rental unit such as the tenant/resident/lessee ( legal resident )

the occupant ( minors / roommates / caretakers ) and then registered owners such as the homeowner / bank / title company - since you may need to serve legal notices you

will need to have all that data so you can send certified mailed copies to the LEGAL parties not just someone over 18 or who answers the door.

Hope this helps

Stephen

[Larryo]

In what "form" are the forms of this database? Are they records? Text on the FileMaker layouts?

The forms are currently a Word document.