Hi Kimberley

>This program relies on the records in the table (like an auto-incrementing field).

It is unlikely an auto-incrementing field uses the records in the table to determine the next value. That could be very slow.

> We more our deleted records into an inactive table, so if the last record gets moved than this will create an id that has already been used but is no longer in the "active" table. I need to track my ids in my counters table to avoid this potential problem.

That's what the routine I gave you does. It uses a counters table to hold the last id generated for each table.