Creating a table to Track Monthly Client Contacts

[dmm1977]

I am a fairly novice Access user and have been tasked with creating a database that tracks target outcomes for a grant. One of the target outcomes is the number of contacts each month a client has with a therapist. I know that I need to create tables in order to create a database, but I am confused about how to create a table that tracks therapy contacts. I have created a table with client identifying information that includes Client ID number, Client Last Name, Client First Name, and Client Date of Birth. I don't, however, know how to create another table for the number of therapy contacts a client has each month. I don't want to enter specific dates, I just want to be able to say client A had 2 therapy contacts in January of 2017, and 3 therapy contacts in February of 2017, etc. I want to be able to record this for Client B, Client C, etc. as well. How do I structure a table to record this? Creating fields for each month/year seems cumbersome, so I don't know if that is what I will have to do. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[plog]

Read up on foreign keys (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_key) and then database normalization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization). Those are the key ideas that are behind what you want to do.

Now, here's the shortcut version: You will need 1 table with 4 fields:

Contacts
ContactID, autonumber, primary key
ClientID, number, foreign key to Contacts table
ConctactMonth, date, this will hold the first date of every month you want to store (e.g. 1/1/2017, 2/1/2017)
Contacts, number, this will hold how many contacts the client had in that month