I have an application where the salesperson enters sales orders into a local Access application, including all the normal details one would expect. They are nearly always new customers that are not yet in the corporate computers.

These same orders are submitted to the company who enters the same info (although not necessarily identical in terms of how they show a company name) into the corporate mainframe computers. The company eventually sends out commission sheets to the salesperson. They too often do not include some orders, list others wrong in many of the details, necessitating the salesperson compare her records with corporate commission sheets.

Tidbits:
The commissions are normally paid for 12 consecutive months, requiring repeat comparisons of commission amounts, not one time comparisons.

There is no way to get corporate to share more info as to what is in their systems; there is no way to get corporate to enter customer names into their computers in a standardized way.

Therefor there are no fields in the corporate report that are guaranteed to be an identical match with what is entered by the salesperson. They often make errors even in invoice amount, etc.

Thus it seems to me that we have no choice on the salesperson's end but to use the corporate commission sheet to hand enter the corporate assigned ID numbers into such a field in the salesperson's Access database so we can then compare overall data withing the two systems.

I am trying to figure out the easiest way to do that for the salesperson. The starting point is 1)a commission report (electronic) from corporate that shows companyID, CompanyName, many fields to do with the invoice; and 2) the invoice data entered locally into Access by the salesperson.

About the only thing I can think of is to have 2 queries (or forms) sitting side by side on the screen and copying and pasting IDs from corporate data to a comparable field in the local database. On one side show the query with CompanyName and CompanyID from the corporate systems, and on the other side show all comanynames and companyIDs where the companyIDs are null, and alphabetize both of these so that they will mostly match up.

The salesperson can add the appropriate CompanyID from each matching record on the corporate report and, when done, we will still have the list from the local system of those orders that did not make it at all into the corporate system (where the CompanyID is still empty because we could find to match).

My question is, is there any easier way to set this up for the salesperson?