Bhavbhuti Nathwani wrote:
...

> Now that you have been through this and have managed it, I
> would like to ask you about outstanding receivables. I have
> currently kept a flag field in the invoices tables which is
> set to true if an invoice belongs to the previous (or still
> older) year so that it will remain readonly and will not have
> any relevance in accounting except for bill-to-bill
> adjustments for debtors list and o/s letter purposes. These
> such o/s invoices are not removed in the end-of-year
> processing until they are either written-off or adjusted
> completely in the current year. Is this way of mine good
> in your views? Do you have any suggestions for this.

My original intention was something similar... however it
turned out that my clients wanted to know/keep much more of
their client's financial history on an ongoing basis.

I ended up keeping the top-level record for all invoices (not
very large, just a link to the client, the date, total, balance
and similar). These records have an "archive" flag to indicate
when the detail of the invoice no longer exists in the database
(used to control printing and other factors).

With all these top-level records in place it was easy enough to
manage out-standing (non-zero balance) items in the new year.
This historical data has recently become even more important as
the system expands to support additional sales & marketing
efforts.

--
Geoff Worboys
Telesis Computing