I am building my own CRM access database that will contain a list of contacts. I would like to have an opportunity reference one contact as an employee, and another as the customer. Is there a way that I can add employees using their internal user ID (always 4 digits) and autonumber customer contacts?
I don't plan on building forms until I am comfortable that everything is working properly in table view.
You cannot assign an ID to an autonumber field. I might suggest adding an employeeID field to your contacts table that would have the employee ID number. The contact ID would still be an autonumber, so in essence they would have two IDs, but their employeeID would need to be stored in a different field.
You can try something different, but you will likely run into a duplicate ID at some point. Use a seperate table for autonumber Customer IDs. When adding a customer into your contact table, you "insert" a new record into the separate customer ID table to get the autonumber ID. If you're inserting an employee, just use the EmployeeID as the contact ID. So you need to be very careful when mixing two ID systems. It's best to use 1 ID and then use the other ID in some other field.
Consider using two tables, one for contact fields and another for employee-specific fields. Put your AutoNumber field in the contact table, and put the employee id in the employee table. In the employee table, use a foreign key that refers to the AutoNumber field in the contact table.