Frank Situmorang said:
Hello,
I am very thankful to all people here whol helped me. I have finised and
used my church membership database. Now since my specialty is actually
accounting, now I want to try to create an accountinf software:
My question is:
1. Is Access capable of accomodating huge of reccords?
"huge" is a very general term. In the church database I work on, there are
several tables that have about 25,000 records each. That is quite small for
ms-access and the whole system runs just fine. In fact they've installed
the software about five computers in their office and even the pastors can
use the member system when on the phone to look up additional information
about a member they are talking to (family members, last attendance, and
even donation information).
You can see picture of the "classic" task of taking a "value" donation
amount and splitting it out into several accounts here:
http://www.members.shaw.ca/AlbertKallal/Articles/Grid.htm
(look at the very last screen, that one I built for the church member
system).
2. In my try, I only used One to Many table relationship, should there be
Many to Many if it is for accounting software? Waht is the example of many
to
many
At the end of the day, I really never did like the term many to many. In
fact that the end of the day, all the relationships are still really one to
many, and from a conceptual level you really never have to think any other
way about this.
You might be designing a database in which a person can have many favorite
foods. Therefore you have many people with many different favorite foods.
However, at the conceptual end of the day, if you start from the top and
work your way down through he relationships as you build the system,
everything still turns out to be a one to many relationship.
in our favorite food example, we would start out with a table called
tblPeople
we then could create a table called tblListOfFavorateFoods
we then could create a table called tblFoods
we thus have 3 tables
tblPeople - this would be our table of people
tblListOfFavorateFoods - this would be a table that lists out the favorite
foods for each individual person
tblFoods - this would be a table that lists all the available foods that
were allowed to choose to add to our list of favorite foods
tblePeople is a parent table of tblListOfFavorateFoods
tbllistOfFavorateFoods is a parent table of tblFoods
A the end of the day you can get caught up in all this kind of mumbo jumbo
about many to many and so called junction tables. Realistically if you start
at the top most table, and then work your way down, then everything's going
to be a one to many relationship here. It is how you plug these one to many
relationships together that results in a conceptual many to many, but the
end of the day you're only ever working with one to many relationships all
day long.
4. Waht is the important thing to know for accountiong software
I would think a good requirement is that have some understanding of
accounting, or at least what part of the accounting system you plan to
implement into your application.
Since a pretty decent accounting system can be purchased for less cost than
what good developer costs to come in for a day, you're best bet is likely to
choose (purchase) a good accounting package. That accounting package might
have had 5 or 10 developers working on that system for five years, and
that represents 50 man years of work to create that accounting application.
There's simply no way you can put something together in the cost that
someone else can sell you that accounting system. This is kind like
attempting to build your own car in your garage, I've seen some people do
it, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper to just go out and buy one.
I would suggest that you integrate or add to your membership system a
donation system. Simply make sure your donation system allows you to take
the donations from each individual person and split them out to the
appropriate chart of accounts (funds) that you have. Now your membership
system can then produce year end tax receipts each member. Your membership
system can also do things like track attendance.
However for all the true accounting reports that you need I strongly suggest
that you still continue to use an off the shelf accounting system. It
becomes rather simple to build some reports in your membership + donation
system in access that produces a single sheet of paper at the end of the
month with a summary (chart of accounts) that can be typed into a commercial
accounting system. This will take likely less then 10 minutes of time to
type
those totals into that accounting system that you have.
So I don't suggest that you actually build the accounting system in access.
Access is able to do this (and in fact several commercial accounting systems
are actually based on access -- if you look under the hood, the very proper
simply accounting system you see it actually uses access database files for
its information!).
Anyway, it makes no sense to build the accounting system in ms-access.
Access
is a very capable development tool, and you can write a chess game, PAC man
video game, or an accounting system in MS access if you want to.
However it going to take a LOT of time to build an accounting system, and
with off the shelf accounting systems costing well under $200.00, it simply
makes no sense to do this.
So I do suggest that you write the membership, attendance, and donations
system part in MS access. You will have to take your chart of accounts from
your accounting system and put it into access to allow donations to be
correctly split out to the donations or whatever accounts you have.
So entering weekly member donation information into the access system is a
great idea. Once you do this then you can print out a summary sheet that
lists all the accounts and that summary totals sheet can then be entered
into the accounting system. As I mentioned, it not likely going to be more
than about a dozen different accounts that you put those donations into, and
therefore 12 account entries on a sheet being entered into the accounting
system once a month, or even once a week is absolutely nothing in terms of
work (5 minutes???). By putting the information into the full blown
accounting system, then you can produce all of the true accounting report
such as bank reconciliations, assets Depreciation , other bill payments etc,
and all of the general kinds things that one would expect in a general
accounting system.
To make a long story short, I'm simply suggesting that you do the parts in
MS access that will benefit the organization. So, membership lists,
Attendance, and donations with the ability to print out tax receipts for the
people makes a lot of sense to be done and built in MS access.
For the rest of the general accounting needs and stuff I suggest you use the
off the shelf commercial accounting package.
by breaking out and separating the Tass between the two software packages,
you'll save a lot of time and effort, and at the end of the day is still
below to use a high quality accounting system to get your proper accounting
reports that you and your accounts will need at the end of the year, and yet
you'll have a great donation tracking system in which you can produce your
tax receipts and keep track of members.
