Best Practices (Multiple Fields vs. One Field)

Congrats on the soon to be birth of your new Quickbase baby. Very Exciting.

Here are some comments.

These certainly feel like separate fields.

• Date first contact attempted
• Date second contact attempted
• Date we were successful (redundant when the above 3 speak to the answer here)
• Date file moved
• Checkbox if contact info available

This field sounds like a formula field.

• After a max of those 2 attempts, was it successful or not.

• The formula would be like not isnull the first two attempts and the isnull date we were successful.

You can probably have a field to calculate the status based on other fields and maybe you want to have a status override field 

As for when to get user feedback, one common approach is to do something quickly but maybe not polished,  show it to the users when it's 3/4 done to get feedback that you're in the right direction and then finish it off. 

As for this: I've run into wondering whether I need more than one table that is connected, versus a drop-down field built into one table -

There are fields with a very limited number of choices like approved or not approved or yes no then those feel like multiple choice fields. But if it's going to be a longer list then typically a relationship is better because it will let your users enter the drop-down choices. 

Feel free to post back with any more questions.