Repost Work order management

Question

Hi,
I am developing an export management aplication in
asp/vb/access
here are my fields
Purchase Order No.
Purchase Order Date
Invoice No.
Invoice Date
Amount of Invoice
Transporter
Lorry Receipt No.
Bill of Ladding No.
Bill of Ladding Date
Vessel Name
Payment Received
Dispatch due date
Delivery Address
Item Name
Qty
payment received date
Paid/to pay
Bank charges
Freight
Voyage No.
Forwarding agent Bill and sea freight
Net realization of invoice
Trade Discount
Now here is my query :
in my applicatin there will be a scenerio like this :
First the purchase order will come to us from our buyer.
then we will prepare the goods for dispatch which can take a
week to 15-20
days time.
After that we will send the goods
receive the bill of ladding etc.
now shall i put all the above mentioned fields in one access
table or do i
design seperate tables to hold various fields since all the
fields wont be
filled in first data entry since if a purchase order comes at
that time
while filling the po and all that details invoice wont have
been generated
so inovice no, amount cant be filled it can only be filled
after the product
is exported, so i have to update the same record multiple
times.
What should i do, please guide me.
Regds
Sanju

Answer 1

just a general comment- if you will be using this as a
process tracking app,
you'll want some overall field for order_status, and fields
associated with
some of the other fields for their individual status, if
there can be
breakdowns other than just info filled in or not.
especially if the responsibility for that field being filled
in is handed
over to another department or outside supplier.
such as- If you have to call an outside shipper to book
passage on a
vessel, and it can take time for them to reply- you'd want a
way to flag
that the booking call has been made, to whom, and a way to
flag this as a
problem when some time period has gone by and it's status
hasn't changed.
make a process graph on all the steps for this, figure out
what info on
problems at what points will improve things.