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Hi
I am planning to make a program (Accounting and Budgeting, Billing, Inventory, People and Organizations, ......)
so I need some information about many subjects:
- What is the structure of the database should look?
- Is there any (Controls, Components, Programs, ....) you suggest that will help me while I am developing this type of Applications?
- Is there any thing else should I take care of it before starting this mission?
Please help me!
1) The database will change as you develop the program. Start with the general ledger and a table of account names. Be sure to read up on real accounting practices if you're not familiar with terms like posting, batching, amortizing, etc. It really really helps. But start one table at a time and grow it from there as needed adding columns and additional tables as you go. Be sure your tables are strong keyed. This will give your database about a 100 to 1 speed increase and not doing so is the most common mistake of database newbies.
2) Not really, but most likely, you're going to be designing some type of MDI or tabbed-browser style program. While MDI is easy to do, I'd recommend purchasing a nice tabbed browing framework from some third party control maker. Also, I'd recommend you make your application using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) if you're familiar with it. Finally, while I don't foresee where you'd use it, in my experience, a tree-list view is an invaluable control. DevExperience makes an excellent one.
3) When designing your tables, always include a "company" field. This may seem redundant since you might be thinking "only one company will be using this at a time, why do I need to keep track of what company this data is from?" The reason is, many companies may have sub-companies they need to do individual accounting for.
I work for a small business that purchased a secondary business; and both operate out of the same building. Both companies need separate accounting and separate financial statements. In addition, combined financial statements are also required. The system we use isn't designed easily to do this. You have to exit it and restart it to access a different company; or run two simultaneous copies taking up two licenses and getting the combined numbers from both is a small nightmare. This all could have been avoided if from day 1, the maker of our accounting/MRP system included company fields in all tables.
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