I'd really appreciate anyone's view on how I can solve my problem.
What I've got
I have three bricks and mortar shops, selling new and second hand goods, mainly small electrical goods. We also do small pawnbroking-type loans.
My problem
I've inherited a Borland Paradox db that manages stock and sales, also the pawns. It also lets us register people as customers. But the db isn't networked, so the stores aren't linked.
Thus if a customer registers at store A, he's unknown in store B.
And staff in store A have no way of seeing if store B or C has any Wiis.
What I need
A programmer can convert the db to MySQL quite easily, it seems (I'm not a programmer).
But getting the data in and out of the db seems a lot more complicated.
A freelance programmer suggested writing some VB code for this, but then shied away when he saw the scale of the task.
Others have suggested getting a retail db application and amending it. But so far I've only found dbs for online shops (which are much simpler things). I haven't come across standard shop DBs I can amend.
What would you recommend?