DHES

This is all sounding great to me, other than that bit about the galaxy's coliding. The customer account payment screen sounds right to me.

Thanks for your time.

A news update, i.e. its about damn time!!!

I have been trying to work through a "hump" in trying to getting the POS.EXE portion of the customer accounts feature to work. Basically this consists of adding code to the program to support the feature, finding that the program will no longer compile, moving things to other files or rewriting code so that it is smaller but still does the same thing, finally getting the file to compile, repeat. No fun.

So I now have the POS.EXE program ringing up a sale and when you are asked to choose the payment method you can press [F1] to charge it to the customer's account. If the customer's credit limit - outstanding charges - this sale amount <0 then the sale cannot be charged to the account unless the password is entered.

If the sale is charged to the account the program will always print at least 2 receipts (if you print receipts) and there will be a line on the receipts for the customer to sign. You can then have a paper trail for the accounts if the unthinkable happens and your computer files go to digital heaven.

After the sale is rung up NOTHING from this sale will go into the closing figures on the closing screen or the closing receipt because you have not actually been paid. These sales will be "booked" when the payments are made on the account. However since the merchandise did leave your store your inventory in the stock table will be reduced.

You will be able to see the customer account sale in the "5. Voids" feature and you will be able to reprint it, but you cannot void it. You will have to void it from the "accounts" program.

All the above is finished. The remaining part of the "Hump" is concerrned with exporting the actual invoice to the file and indexing the entire file and making an index for each customer. Most of that is also done and when it is done I will be done with the POS.EXE program for this feature.

Then I get to finish he ACCOUNTS.EXE program that has buckets of free space in it. No more 2 steps forward and then one step back. Once I get to the ACCOUNTS.EXE part it will go much more quickly.

Dale

Comments appreciated.

It good to hear some news on the custormer accounts

Whoohoooo!!!!

Well the good news is that the following shows you that I am working on this...

The plan was to allow the saving to a file of up to 10,000,000 invoices. This is not going to happen. I had been playing with the smallest file (100,000 invoices) because it is quicker to delete and recreate it. This is something that needs to be done many times when the program is being written to make sure that it works every time. Yesterday I came up with the bright idea to see how long it would take to write a blank 1,000,000 invoice file. Apparently it will take forever because after writing more than 500,000 invoices the program died with the error message, "Don't ever even try this again!"

It seems that the file size had exceeded the ability of DOS to address it. This is techno-speak meaning that the maximum file size will be 500,000 invoices. So there will be two options for the file, a maximum of 100,000 or 500,000 invoices. When the limit is exceeded to file will "rollover." This means that (for a 500,000 invoice file) than the 500,001st invoice will be numbered 000,001 and will overwrite the previous 000,001 invoice.

There will also be 4 options to storing transactions as invoices.

1. No invoices.

2. Only transactions charged to the customer's account will go into the invoice file.

3. All transactions linked to a customer (paid or charged to account) will go into the invoice file.

4. All transactions will go into the invoice file.

The point of options 3 & 4 is that the program will have data-mining capabilities when it goes through the invoices.

Dale

Dale,

It sounds great.
I sincerely hope that you are getting some satisfaction from your great efforts.
It is truly appreciated, not only by me but I'm sure by many others.

May you be blessed beyond your wildest dreams.


Great Regards


ToPS

What is the status of Customer Accounts development? Can I join your testing team?

Victor

Hi Dale,

Sorry for bring this up agian.

Is there any news on this (customer accounts) feature.