Administrative nexus for gifts

[mtbc]

This Christmas is at least as complicated as usual. I generate gift ideas for family members and organize buying and wrapping on their behalf. We also have a birthday at around this time. I want to know things like,

• What still needs ordering from vendor X?


• How much does gift-giver Y still owe me?


• How much have I spent on gifts from me to Z?

I find that for each gift I am having to track at least,

• what it is
• given by whom
• to whom
• for which event
• from which vendor
• at what price.

Further, even a simple view of gift status has two dimensions: relating to the gift (ordered? obtained? wrapped?) and relating to payment for it (did I pay? did the giver pay me?). Even with those I still do not know with which vendors I have checked availability and prices, anything about package tracking, currency conversion, complication over the order in which gifts must be opened, etc.

Sortable tables are no longer cutting it. I decided that my best chance of keeping track of all this is to fire up a database and resort to SQL. It has worked excellently: I can even create billing summaries like,

SELECT giver, SUM(price) FROM gifts 
    WHERE paid = 'unbilled'
    GROUP BY giver;

Being able to easily construct queries and updates turns out to be a great help.