Hey Airtable Community!
I was hoping for some help on overall concept / design. I am an insurance restoration contractor and we currently have a base that we are using to manage our workflow.
We do 3 different kinds of jobs (Mitigation, Contents, and Storage). Due to the way my industry works, each are billed as separate jobs. A few variables:
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A customer can have one of the three job type, two of the three job types, or all three of the job types.
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We want our Accounts Receivable people to be able to call the customer and deal with all types of open invoices - so want to be able to cross reference all invoices for each customer readily and easily. We also want to be able to track notes (interactions) for the open invoices - i.e. a note that says they called or emailed the customer, date, time, etc. to make sure that we are working the open AR. Same thing as above - we want to be able to do this on a customer level as opposed to an invoice level. The idea behind wanting to work the customer angle versus the invoice level is visibility of all open $ per customer allows the AR people to ask about all open invoices, rather than working each one as a separate call or email.
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We currently track the financial side of each type of invoice as three fields: Estimate Total, Paid to Date, and Balance Due.
So, I need help in thinking how to do this without overdoing it. I currently have a table called “Jobs” that has the customer name as the primary field. I know I need to link to that field with any other tables I build for this issue, as we talk about all of our AR by customer name - not invoice number. I am not sure if I should make additional tables for each kind of invoice, etc. Seems like whenever I start building this idea out I get cross linked and redundant fast.
I have so many other things going on in this base that we are tracking that I want to make sure I don’t over complicate this idea.
Any structural rules or best practices for a situation like this to make it as easy as possible for others to work in and note updates as we work through the process of invoicing and collecting?
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
WM
