Make your business succeed by taking control of data: how one company easily manages information using a simple database program - case study of Torque Travel owner Donald Douglass and how he manages information - Software Solutions - column

Home Office Computing, July, 1991 by Lisa Kleinholz

He faxes a full list of registrants and room assignments to each hotel almost daily for two weeks leading up to each event. He keeps those in a Roomlist database, updating them manually. (Fax and contacts are drawn by lookup from the Bookings file.)

Douglass has worded his Confirmation, Faxes, and Invoices forms so they can be printed directly, avoiding the extra step of merging data through a word processor. Many businesses can use this trick, which is especially handy when mailings like invoices and follow-up letters are sent on a client-by-client basis.

HOPES FOR THE FUTURE

The missing link for Douglass is the ability to subtract the rooms ordered from his inventory of booked rooms.

"My problem," says Douglass, "is that I haven't had time or experience to move to the next step. A relational database would subtract the confirmation [in the Confirmation file] from hotel inventory [in the Bookings file], and I just haven't gotten to it. So what we constantly have to do is print out reports of orders for each day for each hotel, then I have to go back and check how many rooms we've booked as inventory. Right now it's not a big deal, but if we get bigger it will be an absolute necessity."

He's put a lot of thought into the problem and has tried many ways to solve it. "If we have 20 two-bed rooms on this night," he explains, "and Jim from Spice has taken 12, that has to go over to an inventory file and be subtracted from the booking file."

A hint of frustration creeps into his voice. "And then, obviously, it would be very good to build into the system a blockage where you type in a 10 when, say, Joe from Nissan calls, and the system says, 'Whoops--you don't have 10 on Tuesday,' while he's placing his order and I'm keying it in."

At this point, Douglass books only IMSA races. However, using the same tracks at different times of the year are other racing conferences including CART, which runs the Indianapolis 500 cars, Sports Car Club of America, and vintage race cars--which may use the same tracks as many as three times a year. So, theoretically, he could be booking hotels four or five times a year that he is booking only once or twice now. But to expand that much, he has to automate matching inventory to orders. He would be swamped otherwise, and Douglass admits that this problem is beginning to restrict growth.

Probably the easiest way around this problem is to redesign the Orders report. Douglass already has it sorted and subtotaled by hotel, showing him in a glance how many rooms are needed. But he is still checking that list against on-screen records in the Bookings file to see how many rooms he has available at each hotel. If he used a lookup formula to pull that information from the Bookings file into his Orders report, he'd save himself some cross-checking time. Right now, Professional File's lookup capabilities in reports are limited to three (six with a little finessing), making it tricky to get totals for each day of the week. However, the same principle can be applied to other flat-file database, such as Q&A, that allow for more lookups in reports.