Do you work on business applications?

[abhijit]

How are customers structured in your applications?

Can you describe the data model?

In our application, we have a

corporate_record
customer_record
customer_addresses
customer_contacts

The customer_address stores info on lines of credit.

How is your structure?

[GaryMazzone]

We have

a Corporate record
a Property record (can belong to a corp or not)
a Customer record (can belong to a company or Corporate)
a contact record (a customer can belong to 1 or more companies)

[baja_yu]

Are those four tables? What is the application for, what business process are you modeling?

[techgnome]

At my previous job, we had 3 levels... Customer, Billing and Account...
Each Customer could have one or more Billing. Each Billing could then have one or more Accounts. Since we were dealing with utilities (gas/electricity/water) ... the Account represented the meter at the location. Billing represented where the bill actually goes. For single family residentials, it was a one-to-one-to-one relation. Some apartments would have a 1-to-1-to-many (the bill is sent to the management company) or it could be 1-to-many-to-one (the residents get the bill & pay it themselves). We also had cases of one-to-many-to-many.

-tg

[abhijit]

We have

a Corporate record
a Property record (can belong to a corp or not)
a Customer record (can belong to a company or Corporate)
a contact record (a customer can belong to 1 or more companies)

Where does the company fit into your model?

[abhijit]

Are those four tables? What is the application for, what business process are you modeling?

I am engaged in a data mapping exercise. So out of curiosity I posed this question.

My target system doesn't have a place for customer_addresses separately. In our current (source system) world, the customer_addresses represent customer profiles under the main customer_record. This address is where we send invoices.

[abhijit]

At my previous job, we had 3 levels... Customer, Billing and Account...
Each Customer could have one or more Billing. Each Billing could then have one or more Accounts. Since we were dealing with utilities (gas/electricity/water) ... the Account represented the meter at the location. Billing represented where the bill actually goes. For single family residentials, it was a one-to-one-to-one relation. Some apartments would have a 1-to-1-to-many (the bill is sent to the management company) or it could be 1-to-many-to-one (the residents get the bill & pay it themselves). We also had cases of one-to-many-to-many.

-tg

I believe "Billing" represents where you sent the invoices to the customers.
Is that correct?

[GaryMazzone]

Missed that I left that out a company can be a corporation (1 to 1) a part of a corperation or a stand alone entiy (a management company).

[techgnome]

Correct...the Billing level controls the level at which the invoice is generated. It's possible to still have multiple invoices sent to the same location, which I've seen done for budgeting reasons (let's say I have 6 stores, I want to recieve all of the bills, but I want to see how much store #3 is using vs store #4 and so on.

-tg

[abhijit]

Gary,
I suppose a property record determines the address of the entity. Do you have an identifier on a property?
Where do you send invoices?

[GaryMazzone]

Yes there is an address field on the property table if the and also one on the Corporate level if the billing goes to corporate. There is also addtress info on the contact table since a contact can work for multiple hotels as a consultant we might need to bill to different addresses for different things