Question Regarding Date Sensitive Tables

[Greg Jesky]

I have created a form to update a table for wireless bills. My form worked
fine the first bill (Feb bill) I entered but now I am trying to enter the
second month bills and I believe I have messed up on designing the keys or
the form.
My church receives 1 bill with 8 wireless units(telephone numbers)
included. I have built a table and forms to enter bill summary information,
that is total information regarding overall bill amount, payments made,
adjustments, Taxes, FCC charges etc..
I have established the account number as the primary key.

I have also built a table for the units(subsets of the overall bill)
associating individual charges with the units.I have the account number in
the unit table(foreign key?) I also have a bill date field in my account
table form and my Unit table.
When I input the second month bill amounts my form gets an error message
stating that the primary keys can't be duplicated. I can not then update the
individual unit(telephone number) information. Of course my bill date field
changes in the second month. Is this a form problem?

Does anyone have suggestions on how to input time sensitive type
information for the same account number? I appreciate you patience
Thank You,
Greg

 

[John Vinson]

Does anyone have suggestions on how to input time sensitive type
information for the same account number? I appreciate you patience

Certainly. Each Account should have a record in the Accounts table;
and each Bill should have a record in a DIFFERENT table, the Bills
table, which should be related one-to-many to the Accounts table.

Your Bills table should have just one field indicating which account
the bill is for, as a link to the Primary Key of the Accounts table;
it should also have fields for the date of the bill, the amount, and
any other information which pertains to that particular bill. It
should NOT have any information about the account name or other
account properties; that information should exist only once, in that
record of the Accounts table.

John W. Vinson[MVP]