The sales people here are complaining about something. They don't like how one customer code cannot really store more than one address. We're a business that sells new and aftermarket parts for antique cars. As you might imagine, people buy this sort of thing to restore their cars. This is quite often not done by them. As such we do an awful lot of invoices with the "Bill To" and "Ship To" addresses being different. Sales orders of course support this but actual AR customer codes can only have one address. Sure, it's currently possible to use the ship to code field and have the restoration shop be a customer too but the sales people hate that. They think that it clutters up the AR list with all sorts of extra customer codes. Which it does. There are some instances where it would be good to do it the way it is now. For instance, a restoration shop / automotive repair center might work on more than one car that we sell parts for. But a lot of times people work on their car at their cousin Vinny's in Queens or Bolivian people fly to Miami to do business and want to smuggle parts back to Bolivia on their way back. In such an instance we might want to ship to that location several times but only for that one customer. The sales people think it's a pain and cluttery to have to setup a new customer code for this. To some extent I agree with them. I'm pretty sure that most other ERP packages allow for multiple addresses associated with one customer. I imagine it's setup the way it is now to make it easy to associate multiple customers to the same ship to / etc but that's actually pretty rare that anyone would be using the same ship to as anyone else. In the few cases it happens I don't think we'd care if there are technically duplicates. It really would have been better all along to allow for multiple addresses for each customer and forget the silly ship to code business. Yes, I, Mr Database Normalization, do not want database normalization here.

Good thinking! I was just voicing the complaint for our users and not really thinking about how it would really be done in the database.

Quote from kkmfg on 09/29/09 at 06:23:51:

 
My company has reps for its product line.  In some instances, we bill the rep, but ship to the customer (for example, customer orders new equipment, and rep is doing the install).   Later, the customer orders parts from us directly, so we bill and ship to the customer (seperate billing and shipping addresses).  Right now, we manually enter ship to addresses in sales orders if the end customer does not have an account set up (i.e. a drop shipment from a reseller).    I think seperate tables for bill to and ship to with associations would be much better that what EVO does now.