Budget table design

[jwillet1]

I have a table that tracks, monthly and yearly, budgets and actuals for head count. As of now I have columns for month, year, budget, and actual. Recently i have thought that changing the budget and acutals columns to type and value would be more appropriate.

For example:

Current: CalMonth, CalYear, Actual, Budget​

New: CalMonth, CalYear, Type(budget or actual), Value​

Which one is more appropriate?

 

[plog]

The second, however I would make 2 additional changes:

1. Do not use 'Value' as a field name, its a reserved word (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/286335). Name it after what value it represents (HeadCount?)

2. Combine the CalMonth and CalYear fields into CalDate. Make that an actual date field and then you can easily use Access's date functions (http://www.techonthenet.com/access/functions/). So instead of CalMonth=5 and CalYear=2014, I would have CalDate=5/1/2014. It's going to make comparing time frames a whole lot simpler.

 

[Solo712]

I have a table that tracks, monthly and yearly, budgets and actuals for head count. As of now I have columns for month, year, budget, and actual. Recently i have thought that changing the budget and acutals columns to type and value would be more appropriate.

For example:

Current: CalMonth, CalYear, Actual, Budget​

New: CalMonth, CalYear, Type(budget or actual), Value​

Which one is more appropriate?

Hi,
I am not sure what prompted you to want to change the design. I, personally would stick with the original schema because it saves table space. All things being equal, the "Current" design will hold the same amount of information in exactly half of the table space of the "New".

Best,
Jiri