I am hoping someone can give me some guidance on this...
I am constructing a database that keeps track of equipment that my employer sells. Most of the equipment we sell will have a product warranty from the manufacturer, and/or a product warranty that our company itself will provide.
I was wondering what would be the best practice for storing the lengths of the various different warranties for our various equipment in a table field. Some warranties might be specified in years, others in months, and others in days. I shouldn't require anything more granular than days.
Should I have three number-type fields for specifying years, months, and days? Maybe then I can have a calculated field that give the total in days, and possibly another calculated field that converts it into months? I feel like with that, I would also need a lot of data validation rules to prohibit someone from entering something confusing, like 3 years and 24 months.
I greatly appreciate any wisdom you folks here might have to share.