Hi, I have to put up a customer archive and in each registry I would like to set a billing frequency, Monthly, Bimonthly, Quarterly, Half-yearly or Annual. Given this assumption, every month I invoice, I would like Filemaker to show me only customers whose frequency matches.
Obviously, once an invoice has been issued, it should automatically update the next expiration date.
What advice would you give me to deal with this, considering that I still have to start the project?
Thank you.
If I assume that these schedules are overlapping (two customers might have monthly frequency but have different start dates), then I would suggest that each customer needs a "next billing date" field in their record, as well as a "billing frequency" field. Every day you would find customers whose "next billing date" is today, create invoices, and then update the next billing date according to the selected schedule.
You haven't said very much about where the financial information comes from. If you are a consultant logging billable hours, then my suggestion above works quite well as any pending charges simply get added to the next invoice. If it's a subscription with a fixed fee per billing period, then you could add a new field to insert that number. But if the charges are calculated in some other way, the approach might be different.