Hi Cetin, I have it sorted now but am interested in your suggestion, what I have is a table containing a list of claim_references that represent people my company have written to asking for confirmation of their addresses ( we are paying them a dividend ) , for each claim_reference I need to clear some some fields in another table and insert a record into a "Letter History" table , which keeps a record of who we've written to - dead easy in Foxpro ! and I have it working ok in SQL Server - but I'm always open to other ways of doing things ( a true fox person I suppose ) thanks for your time