Can i Create one table for purchases orders and sales orders?

Question

I'm creating a Motorcycle store system, i wondering if i need to create one table that contains orders, the sales orders and the purchases orders with a column that will be called OrderType that determine if its purchase order or sale order the same with Payments, money that i pay to supplier and money that customer pay to me, should be in table that called payment and column that determine if its outgoing payment or income is that ok? or i need to create other tables

Answer 1

I would consider against it... Purchases are from a vendor YOU get the products from to build/fix/manufacture something.

Sales orders would have a customer you are selling to and thus would be foreign keys to different tables... unless your customer table has your vendors too and that has some column to identify difference as Vendor vs Customer.

Additionally, as you expand your design development and queries, purchasing history, etc., it may be more beneficial to have them separate.

Answer 2

You can create a single table. Whether this is good design or unfortunate design depends on how you use the data. How many times do you ever want to query these two datasets as if they were one dataset? How many times to you query them separately?