New Requirement for Out of School Club (1 Viewer)

RickT

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Hello,
1st post on the forum, I have recently started volunteering to assist on the technical side with a local after school club which is a not for profit organisation with 4 staff members looking after a total of 30 children over the course of the week before and after school for a few hours either side.



At present, everything is done manually on paper from the daily registers, parent pickup sign out sheets, invoices and account management to track payments. As you can imagine this is a massive overhead in time to complete so the club could benefit with some automation in place to provide a more efficient process.


Therefore im looking to develop some form database / toolset to simplify process.


At present, i see the requirements are as follows....


  • Child and parent database for contact details including email.
  • Export data to form daily register of children due to attend.(names from a picklist pulled from the contact details)
  • Parent collection signature /sign out form digital or paper to record collection of child and time for audit purposes.
  • Invoice / report creation based on the data taken from the register for those attended to be compiled on a monthly basis.
  • Account summary per child/family detailing sessions attended and current balance based on payments/invoiced amount.
My initial thoughts where to compile some form of Access DB to host this type of request rather than going to a 3rd party company due to the lack of funding available, however in order to start this im really not sure where to start.


Is anyone aware of any open source templates which could be a foundation to work on and customise further to our requirements rather than creating from scratch / blank canvas or offer any advice that MS Access is the right tool for this type of requirement ?



Thank you in advance.
 

gemma-the-husky

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You could probably use any club membership system as a starting point.
 

RickT

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You could probably use any club membership system as a starting point.


Problem is finding one at the moment. - i've not used Access for about 10 years so just watching youtube videos at the moment to refresh my memory
 

The_Doc_Man

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offer any advice that MS Access is the right tool for this type of requirement

I have no templates to share regarding membership but can confirm for you that Access can do this sort of thing pretty easily. Nothing you listed in your "wish list" looks that tough but I have no knowledge of actually collecting signatures. Everything else in your bullet list should be a piece of cake.

Here's a big hint: Think "Divide and conquer." Each bullet in your list is a focal point for a division of focus - which says you have already done some necessary preliminary work and that's good. Programming is almost always about breaking problems down into individually achievable steps, and your problem at first blush does not appear to be outside that norm.
 

Mark_

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Welcome Rick!

Something you may want to look at is getting a swipe card reader. Rather than trying to collect signatures, if you capture the track 1 or track 2 data off of a card you may have an easier time.
 

RickT

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Thank you all for your suggestions and welcomes..



Plan is to try and pull something basic over the course of the weekend and then take it from there.



I do like the idea of a swipe card too :) but will start with the basics



thanks
 

Mark_

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RickT,

Most of the low end swipe card readers simply read a track and output as text (think automatically keying in) so (hopefully) all you'd have to do is have focus on a text control and it gets pushed right in.
 

JHB

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Swipe card reader is okay, but if it were me I would prefer it as with contactless credit card.
 

Micron

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there's a ton of schemas here http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/
Maybe you'll find something under the headings of children or churches. Note that these are not templates or db's , but schemas. If they don't make any sense to you, then consider reviewing

Normalization Parts I, II, III, IV, and V http://rogersaccessblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/entity-relationship-diagramming-part-i.html
and/or
http://holowczak.com/database-normalization/

Entity-Relationship Diagramming: Part I, II, III and IV http://rogersaccessblog.blogspot.ca/2009/01/entity-relationship-diagramming-part-i.html

How do I Create an Application in Microsoft Access?
http://rogersaccessblog.blogspot.ca/2009/05/how-do-i-create-application-in.html

Some of these pages have moved but can still be accessed from the target pages. I'll have to update my list. I left off my usual links for naming conventions and other tips. I don't wish to imply you don't know much Access stuff.
 

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