Hi Bob,
You're right of course - your suggestion would be the best way to do it. What you suggest is how I have our Purchase Orders/Receiving set up.
On our sales orders, we play everything very close to the edge with 'just in time' on inventory and deliveries to clients. We take printed orders, divide them into different van routes, then take each route to the whs, pull products for each order - handwriting adjustments on the ticket (if the order is for 10 ctgs and we only have 8 on the shelf, we'll handwrite the ticket 6 each, and write backorder 4 each on the bottom of the ticket, print delivery labels for those 6, then move on to the next ticket. After the vans are gone, we make a list of products that need to be reordered, and those get entered into PO's to be placed later that day. When the van comes back after its route, the backorder tickets are generated for those incomplete tickets that just came in. They go in a backorder file, and are pulled when the product arrives tomorrow or the next day from our vendor. This happens twice each day (3 vans make two runs per day). We're small and try to be very quick in delivery (one of our selling points - order by lunch, get it before dinner), and our experience is that we have to move faster sometimes than textbook computer procedure allows. After the dust clears, then we process what we just did into the system.
We developed the 'add an A or B or C' to the original ticket # as a way to group tickets on a screen report (we used to remanufacture laser ctgs inhouse for clients, and the original order was actually a pickup ticket for empty cartridges to be remanufactured, then completion tickets would be made - sometimes 3 or 4 tickets would have to be generated before the entire order got filled, on bigger orders). This gave our reps a quick and dirty way to get a chronological view of order patterns for a client.
It just seems an intuitive way to 'see' an order from start to finish.
I'm trying to give some of my clients a button to run an HTML report they can see what they ordered last month, find a PO, etc. And if the backorder tickets don't get excluded, then the report give inaccurate $$$ and quantity info.
In any event, my wife says I'm always grumpy when I'm stumped, so for her sake

I'd love to see how to Xremove records from a result set that catches all of them