Thanks Enmanuel, I guess that means you prefer doing the calculation each time an update is made and storing the balance. (BTW I know what a trigger is and have used them many times <s>.)

>You can have a trigger that calculates the oustanding balance everytime a receipt is entered.
>
>Check for triggers on the help!
>
>>Hi,
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>>I couldn't find a section for design questions like this, so I've placed it here in chatter.
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>>I am working on a system where sales are entered, then when payments are received a receipt gets printed. The receipt and the invoice both show the balance due or outstanding.
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>>The tables I have are Sales and Sale Details and Payments and Payment Details.
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>>The Sales table has a field for Balance Due and the Payment Details table (related to the Sales table by Sale ID) also has the balance due stored in it.
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>>I have two problems with this design:
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>>1. Editing Payments causes problems with the balance due. For example, I make a sale for $600, then a payment of $400 is made against this sale. The Balance due on the Sale is put to $200 and the Balance Due on the Payments details record for this sale is put at $200. If another payment gets made of say $100, then the Sale's balance due is set to $100 and the payment details is set to $100. If I realise that a mistake was made on the first payment and it was actually $250 that should have been entered, changing the $200 payment to $250 causes all my balances to go off.
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>>Should I not let a payment be changed? Only let them add new payments?
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>>Or would a re-design help? Any suggestions?
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>>Or is the design good enough and it is just that I need to change the way my calculations are done when calculating the balance due?
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>>2. I dislike having calculated fields stored in the tables, I would much prefer to calculate the balance due on the fly. However doing it this way speeds up reporting and the user interface, so I will live with this.
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>>Thanks for any opinions.