I have a question about adjusting my base design to accommodate a new data requirement.
I use my base to run our property management company. It consists of 4 main sections: Customer tables, Contract tables, Property tables and Invoice tables. When I created the base I did not think about the possibility of a customer selling one home and moving and retaining our services for the new home. Silly me. Our customers are owners of generational homes in a resort and as such they rarely sell.
In the contracts table I have a field that captures the year we took them on as a customer of that property. That year is derived from the signature date of the contract for the current property. All fine and good until they move. Now we have an old customer with a new house and the years as customer is now only valid for the new property. I lose the history of their original contract. I need to have a way to keep the original year.
I have thought about putting a field in the customer table for their original signing year? I don’t want to make my life more difficult when trying to retrieve data in the future. And I come from the old school of Access and even before that IBM DBase where every bit of data was evaluated for need due to memory and transaction impact. It is not nearly as important in the age of huge memory, storage and incredibly fast processors and Internet speeds in the gigabytes.
Anyone have a thought on how to remedy this oversight?
Thanks, Scott
