Aaron,

It looks like you were well served by the programmer you hired. In this you
were lucky since there are many people out there who pass themselves off as
capable programmers but who are actually grossly incompetent. A great many
small businesses here have been burned so many times by such scoundrels that
they swear that they will never pay a consultant to develop custom software
ever again. And this hurts both small businesses and developers like
myself.

You certainly have not gone overboard. In fact, I am sure that if I built a
model of your business processes, I could find more things for your database
to do. One thing to consider is that as your database grows, Access will
have more trouble handling the volume of data (this is a long term
consideraton for a small business, so there is no need to worry about it
yet). I'd expect that at some point, you will find it necessary to migrate
to a more robust, and faster, database. I'd suggest MySQL because it is
free and an excellent product. And you can hire a programmer to write a
couple simple scripts to copy your data from Access to MySQL. If the
programmer is at all competent, he should be able to write the script and
complete the transfer in an hour or two. OTOH, if he is just a kid fresh
out of college, he'll likely flounder for a few days trying to figure out
what to do and how.

One of the things I am implementing over the next few months to a year is an
inventory control application that supports enterprises that have both a
virtual store and a bricks and mortar store. And of course, bar-coding will
be a vital part of the instore portion of the application.

I'd suggest you just carry on, letting your database evolve as you see more
things you can do with it that will help earn more money. I am unusual, WRT
software developers, in that I won't implement something just because I can.
Rather, I'll develop something only if a case can be made that doing it will
generate more revenue than it costs to implement it.

You could, if you wish, create a software developer's version of Rob's
rules. Beginning with, "No matter how well developed a given application
is, there are always many more features that can be built into it" (this is
known among experienced software engineers as feature creep, and it is often
the cause of the failure of software development projects).

Cheers,

Ted


--
R.E. (Ted) Byers, Ph.D., Ed.D.
R & D Decision Support Solutions
http://www.randddecisionsupportsolutions.com/
Healthy Living Through Informed Decision Making