Invoice/Reports How Many Copies Printed?

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Westaradg - 13 Aug 2006 01:53 GMT

How do I instruct my database to tell me if an Invoice has been printed
already, and that if someone has printed it already the next copy will
indicate it's a reprint? And if I really had my way it would tell me
something like reprint-1 or reprint-2.

Thank You.

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Larry Linson - 13 Aug 2006 06:18 GMT

> How do I instruct my database to tell me if an Invoice has been printed
> already, and that if someone has printed it already the next copy will
> indicate it's a reprint? And if I really had my way it would tell me
> something like reprint-1 or reprint-2.

There's no "this Invoice Report has been printed X times" property.

If you use DoCmd.OpenReport to print it, you could write code to record how
many times that DoCmd.OpenReport has been executed, provided you _print_ the
report from that statement. However, my typical practice is to open the
Report in preview mode, and let the user decide whether to print or close --
so a count such as I describe would be impossible for me. Finally, there's
no way to know whether the actual print was successful -- I have seen a lot
of paper jammed, crumpled, and then thrown away on shared printers in large
offices.

Just offhand, I'd say that only you can decide whether too many assumptions
would be required to "trust" the only counts that you are likely to be able
to generate.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP

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Westaradg - 14 Aug 2006 01:57 GMT

Good points, thank you for your input. I was mainly trying to think of a
way to prevent double billing by some how making it indicate the invoice was
a reprint and with the volume of small invoices this would be for it's not
really practical to preview each one before printing them. Any advice on how
to overcome this from the application side verses the employee/monkey
training side would be appreciated.

Thank you.

> > How do I instruct my database to tell me if an Invoice has been printed
> > already, and that if someone has printed it already the next copy will
[quoted text clipped - 18 lines]
> Larry Linson
> Microsoft Access MVP

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Larry Linson - 25 Aug 2006 04:06 GMT

I don't have a _good_ suggestion for this. I suspect I would, on some Form
involved in the Invoicing process have a Check Box or Radio Button for the
user to click indicating that the Invoice had been printed, if they are
printed separately. If you print them in a "batch," then a Query that has
the same criteria as the one selecting invoices to print could be used to
update the Yes/No Field indicating they have been printed. It's just not
possible to fully automate this and make it foolproof.

You'll reduce one point of possible failure if the person printing the
invoices has a dedicated printer in his/her office/cubicle/error rather than
using a shared printer in a large office. At least, in that case, the
person can spot a jam and take early action to remedy it, determine the
mangled invoices, and reprint them.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP

> Good points, thank you for your input. I was mainly trying to think of a
> way to prevent double billing by some how making it indicate the invoice
[quoted text clipped - 37 lines]
>> Larry Linson
>> Microsoft Access MVP

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