I have a table that holds data for a person who is on a project. The table has a Start date field a nullable End date field. So, a person is on a project from Start to End.
At the moment, they are always billable to the project. But I now have a new requirement that, for a period, they can be non-billable, yet, still working on the project. So, they have been assigned to the project, and are working, but for some reason, the client isn't billed for part of the period they are assigned, or maybe billed at a lower rate.
My idea is to have an exclusion type table, linked to the person assignment table which would have a start date, and end date, and a Rate column, which could be set to zero for no-charge, or else, works as an override value for a period.
Does this seem like valid design? As the person is billed 95% of the time, and probably will never had any exclusion, it makes more sense to me to have an exclusion table.
If anyone has an idea of how to do this better, it would be great.
At the moment, I also have a 'calendar' table, which I join to based on the start/end date of the person's schedule to get the daily rate. So, I could then join to the exclusion date as well, to see if there is an override of the rate?
Issues I might find with my design, are a lot of the joins are based on:
ON DateValue BETWEEN Start AND End
And I am not sure they're the most efficient joins.
If the exception could be one or more period of times (one-to-many) for one project then your design using an exclusion table is the best design.
Example:
June 1, 2013 to June 30, 2013
Exclusion:
June 9, 2013 - 0 Rate
June 25 to 27 - 30% of Original Rate
However, if the exclusion is possible and can only be a maximum of ONE single period (or one-to-one type of relationship) then you might instead put it on the same fields as other fields on project table.
Example:
June 1, 2013 to June 30, 2013
Exclusion:
June 9, 2013 - 0 Rate
I would use this "exclusion" table as single storage for person-project occupation data. In case when person is assigned to project one time without changes in rate, you will have one record in this table. In other cases you will have a history of rate changes in this table.
It looks like your are allowing discount on standard rate to the customer for specific period. for such case, you can set the rate to be negative eg.-$100/hours for the duration to set resource rate for free in your discount/exclusion table. you can find the final rate for that resource for particular period by adding your discount amount and standard amount to get net amount. In your design, you have already mentioned the relation will be made between exclusion and person assignment table. your design will allow to show what discount has been given to the customer. This approach is ok when your are adjusting the billing for exception cases.
In case, your are trying to do correction in project billing, IMO, you should have separate entries in person assignment table for each rate with the duration.
While generating Invoice to the customer, you can show adjusted discounted rate or new revised billing based on the correction.
Related
I'm a pretty new programmer and I'm working on a project that I'm not sure how to make work. I'm hoping for some advice please.
Part of the project I'm working on will be used by a company to allow employees to sign up for lunch from their computers. I'm doing the project in MVC ASP.NET
The interface will look something like this:
----------------------
|1200 | Employee Dropdown Name 1
| Employee Dropdown Name 2
|---------------------
|1230 | Employee Dropdown Name 1
| Employee Dropdown Name 2
|---------------------
and on and on and on.
With this company, everything has to be recorded and stored. So, I already have a table with employee information. That will populate the drop down areas. Lunch times need to be stored in the database so it can be searched years down the line. So it has to be in a table.
The table get more tricky because not every time of the day is available for lunch (i.e. - no lunches after 0430 and before 0800).
My question is about how to create the future time slots in the database.
I could obviously make the table with all of these rows already in places for several years down the line. That's time-consuming, though, and I'll have to go back in in several years and fix it. Horrible idea.
What I'd LOVE to do is make it so every 24 hours, the database just automatically adds new rows with the next days times available - so just increment (at midnight, the program will just add the next day's times associated with that date (so at midnight on February 6, 2020, it will create February 7, 2020 0000, February 7, 2020 0030, etc. I've studied a lot but I'm still beside myself on how to make this work.
Thanks in advance everyone!!!
As I understand, you want to drive your interface from the database table so that the user can select Name 1 and Name 2 and a time slot and submit.
It sounds like you also want the available timeslots to be driven by the database also (ie, timeslot in table without names with it is availlable). This is not a good idea. As you mentioned, you would be inserting data that is not actually a record but a placeholder. That will be very confusing down the track when you come to query the data.
My approach would be to do the following:
* add NOT NULL constraints to all columns in your database (if your database supports this feature) or have your app complain very much about NULLS in any of the columns. There is no need for NULLS in your use case by the look of it.
the database should have a CHECK constraint that the time is within the allowable time range, and (assuming employees can not double book time slots) a CHECK constraint that there is no overlapping time slots, and also a UNIQUE constraint that ensures no duplicate times.... adjust to suit your needs.
your app populates times between 0800 and 1630 (8AM and 4:30PM) and also query the database for all records matching the current day so those booked slots can be removed from the list of available time slots... adjust to suit.
your app sends the user request of name and time slot to the DB. All the critical requirements are accepted or rejected by the DB schema and if there is something wrong, display an appropriate error in the app.
This way, your database is literally storing records of booked lunches.
I would NOT go down the path of pre inserting as then it becomes more complex as some records are "real" and some are artificially generated records to drive a GUI...
If you can't do the time slot calculations in your app rather than in the DB, then at least use a separate table that is maintained by a worker thread in your app OR if your DB supports it, a Stored Procedure which returns a table of available time slots.
I would use the stored procedure if I was avoiding doing complex time calculations in my app (also avoids need to worry about time zones - if you make sure to only store and display UTC times in your DB).
Having in mind structure like this:
LunchTimeSlots (id, time_slot)
Employee (id, name, preferred_time_slot_id, etc)
Lunches(employee_id, time_slot_id, date)
You need a scheduled job to add records to the "Lunches" table every midnight. How to define the job depends on your database vendor. But most of the popular rdbms have this feature. (f.e. mssql)
Despite it's possible to do what you want with db schedulers or any other scheduler, i would recommend to avoid such db design. It's always better to write real facts to the database like a list of employees or fact that lunch was served
to employee at 1pm today.
Unlike real facts, virtual data can be always generated "on-the-fly" by sql queries. F.e. by joining employees to list of dates from today till year 2100, we can get planned lunches for all employees for next 80 years.
So I'm developing a database for an agency that manages many relief staff.
Relief workers set their availability for each day in one of three categories (day, evening, night).
We also need to be able to set some part-time relief workers as busy on weekly, biweekly, and in one instance, on a 9-week rotation. Since we're already developing recurring patterns of availability here, we might as well also give the relief workers the option of setting recurring availability days.
We also need to be able to query the database, and determine if an employee is available for a given day.
But here's the gotcha - we need to be able to use change data capture. So I'm not sure if calculating availability is the best option.
My SQL prototype table looks like this:
TABLE Availability Day
employee_id_fk | workday (DATETIME) | day | eve | night (all booleans)| worksite_code_fk (can be null)
I'm really struggling how to wrap my head around recurring events. I could create say, a years worth, of availability days following a pattern in 'x' day cycle. But how far ahead of time do we store information? I can see running into problems when we reach the end of the data set.
I was thinking of storing say, 6 months of information, then adding a server side task that runs monthly to keep the tables updated with 6 months of data, but my intuition is telling me this is a bad fix.
For absolutely flexibility in the future and keeping data from bloating my first thought would be something like
Calendar Dimension Table - Make it for like 100 years or Whatever you Want make it include day of week information etc.
Time Dimension Table - Hour, Minutes, every 15 what ever but only for 24 hour period
Shifts Table - 1 record per shift e.g. Day, Evening, and Night
Specific Availability Table - Relationship to Calendar & Time with Start & Stops recommend 1 record per day so even if they choose a range of 7 days split that to 1 record perday and 1 record per shift.
Recurring Availability Table - for day of week (1-7),Month,WeekOfYear, whatever you can think of. But again I am thinking 1 record per value so if they are available Mondays and Tuesday's that would be 2 rows. and if multiple shifts then it would be multiple rows.
Now and here is the perhaps the weird part, I would put a Available Column on the Specific and Recurring Availability Tables, maybe make it a tiny int and store something like 0 not available, 1 available, 2 maybe available, 3 available with notice.
If you want to take into account Availability with Notice you could add columns for that too such as x # of days. If you want full flexibility maybe that becomes a related table too.
The queries would be complex but you could use a stored procedure or a table valued function to handle it fairly routinely.
I have a 2 access 2007 tables with the following fields:
Table 1: Loan Release Table
ReleaseDate as Date
Maturity as Date
MemberName as Text
MemberNo as Text
Term (in months) as Number
Mode (M/Q/Semi-Monthly) as Text
LoanType as Text
LoanAmount as Currency
LoanCode as Text
Table 2: Payments Table
ReceiptNo as Text
DatePaid as Date
MemberName as Text
MemberNo as Text
LoanCode as Text
LoanReceivable as Currency
InterestPaid as Currency
I would like to ask on how to use Query to create a temporary table that will display Members that should pay on current date or a specified date base on their Term, Mode of Payment and Loan Type (Regular Loans every 30 days to pay, Special Loans every 45 days to pay) and their remaining balance.
Here's my First Attempted Query: I tried to subtract 30 days from Current Date and it obviously gave me just the transactions last month. I would like it to list all transactions including those for example Member with Regular Loan 12 month term on their 3rd monthly payment, Member with Special Loan that is due today.
I am thinking of creating another table that contains the schedule of payments of every Loan released and then go from there.
Is there another way than this? Like a Query that can be run everyday without the need for a bulky ScheduleOfPayments table?
I'm an office clerk who 'graduated' from Excel and a novice using Access at worst and I'm not afraid of VBA codes if that is necessary.
If you know of a better way of doing this, please do tell me or point me in the right direction. I'm all for learning new things and having read and learned a lot from stackoverflow before, I am sure that with your help, my question is as good as solved.
Thank you guys for reading my inquiry.
You have here two solutions:
You can write a procedure that will, when needed, calculate\generate a matrix containing payment schedule for each loan and compare it to payment done.
You can write a procedure that will, when a loan is created, generate corresponding records in a payment schedule table. further comparison will be done between the ScheduledPayment table and the Payment table.
So basically you have to manage a similar set of data, either as a calculated/on the fly matrix or as a permanent set of data kept in a table.
The second version is by very very far the most effective one. You think of it as bulky but it is exactly the opposite, and indeed what is done every time you get a loan from a bank, where your banker will let you sign the reimbursement schedule.
The table solution will allow you to make use of all querying facilities, while the calculated solution will force you to write specific procedures each time you'll want to do some data mining. Just think about a question like "What are the expected reimbursements for the month of April 2014?". Answering this question with the ScheduledPayment table will be as easy as getting a cafe out of your nespresso machine. The same answer without the ScheduledPayment table will be like having to do the whole coffee production process before getting your cup ready.
Imagine you have a website which lists available hotel rooms and their prices.
The hotel owners set a price per day for each room - it only needs to be as complicated as "Jan 1st costs $100" not "Jan 1st 1999 costs $50, Jan 1st 2000 costs $100".
The granularity is limited to day-rate.
What would be the most efficient (in terms of load when querying for rooms) way to represent this in a database?
For each room, have a separate table holding a date field and a price field? ie 365 entries per room.
I see ways to solve this, but the problem becomes slightly more complicated when for example a user wishes to do a query such as "7 days in august with a budget of $500". This is a feature I would dearly like to implement.
The UI will allow owners to set room prices as blocks of time rather than individual day rates - eg if a room price was $50 for jan-jun and $100 for jul-dec then that is two price blocks. Obviously if needs be that could be translated into 365 date type fields, but a solution using two daterange type fields instead would be preferable.
Any pointers as to where I could learn techniques for this would be greatly appreciated. I have searched google and found information on Calendar Tables, but any additional tips or info would be appreciated.
Historically I have used MySQL, but anything would be considered.
In the terminology of Ralph Kimball, this is called a slowly changing dimension.
I would suggest that you look at one of this books. The latest edition of "The Data Warehouse Toolkit" should cover this topic quite well.
I want to have a table that will track all the commissions we are due from our wireless sales. Each plan pays a different Commission, not a problem. We do our reconciliation as sometimes the carriers don't pay (they may miss a line or 2).
The problem occurs when the carriers change how much they pay for the commissions. We want to be able to go back and see that there was 4 lines not paid for in January at commission rate x. but Feb the same types of plans were sold but their commission rates were x-10.
If I change the rate in the commission table for the plan, when i go back to pull the data from the January report I will get incorrect commission rates.
I have a table for sales set up with a date stamp so I was thinking i can cross reference that somehow.
Hope someone followed this.
I am looking for the best way to structure this.
You should "STAMP" the record with the commission rate. You could either stamp the actual rate into every record... or you could keep a commission ID and put that into each record.