Adding notes to customer records

[Ray Ash]

Greetings:

I am no programmer and I am a novice Access user at best. My boss is
extremely cheap, however, so I have been tasked with designing a database
that will accomodate what Microsoft Outlook cannot.

We are a granite countertop fabrication business and interact with
individual customer extensively throughout the process of 1. Selling the job
2. Scheduling a date/time to create templates 3. Creating a template of the
cabinets 4. Selecting materials 5. Scheduling an installation date/time 6.
Fabricating the countertops 7. Installing the granite countertops on site and
8. Scheduling/performing any repairs (if needed).

We currently use Outlook for all scheduling activities in addition to
storing all customer information. We also use Outlook to store any notes
pertaining to the customer. We add to these notes every time we interact
with the customer (like your phone or cable company would note your account
if you called in for whatever reason).

My question is this: Can Access be configured so that a record in the
Customers table can have notes added to it? We need the functionality of
Outlook in this respect. I'd like users to be able to continually update a
"Notes" field in each Customer record so that this information can be stored
and referred to when needed. I also would like a Date/Time stamp and a
Username stamp for each note entered. A typical note for us in Outlook would
look something like this:

12/7/04 13:20 ("username") Mrs. Smith called and advises that her countertop
that we installed on 12/5/04 has a small chip in one corner. I scheduled a
repair for 12/10/04 from 1:00 to 3:00 PM.

Is this possible? If so, what is the best way to configure my Customers
table to accomplish this? I'd like to get away from using Outlook COMPLETELY
sans as strictly an e-mail client.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Rick B]

If it were me, I would add a new table in which to store these notes. I'd
have about three fields. The first would be an autonumber primary key. The
second, would be the customer number. This would let you link the
contact/note to the appropriate customer. The third field would contain the
actual note text. And the last field would be my timestamp data.

If you create the "contacts" database using the built-in template that comes
with Access, there is a button that you use to log calls. This button opens
a pop-up form in which to enter the details. It follows the above
structure.

Based on what you have said, I would think that this database would do most
of what you need as far as storing customer information and logging call.
It would be easy to modify it to perform the other tasks you mention.
Including scheduling and job costing. I think there are actually some
templates for those function as well, though.

I'd suggest you look at the templtes before starting from scratch.

Rick B

 

[Ray Ash]

Ah okay, I'll look into this Contacts database before moving forward. Thanks
for the advice!