I know this has nothing to do with Profiler but as there are alot of software genius' around here and many of you have barcode scanners I thought it wouldn't hurt to ask.

Basically I'm researching a barcode/stock control system for the company I work for and I want to get a general idea of what would be involved. 

Does anyone here have any experience with Portable Data Terminals (PDTs)?
I've heard most scanners will append a character such as {ENTER} or a tilde, but do any scanners allow you to append multiple characters?  I'm thinking of having a scanner at each stage of production, each appending a different character to the barcode to tell the Access db how many items of stock are at each stage.  Is this feasible?