I have a table with sale numbers and line items.
This may be part of the problem, or at the least, it's an indicator of less than perfect design. I interpret this to mean it's all in one table when you should have sales (or invoice or whatever the parent thing is) and the line items in another table. The only thing that should be repeated in the items table is the primary key from the parent.
I don't think that will solve your issue though. The best you might be able to do is identify a record via an ordered query that returns the autonumber id from the line items table (or single table if that's how you must have it). While you could order a table by autonumber ascending (kind of a row identifier) a properly built query is the only way to pretty much guarantee any kind of sort order, barring things like sorting on numbers that are really text. The part about keeping only 1 record for a sale is a bit strange, though.
The more we hear silence, the more we begin to think about our value in this universe.
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