Need Expert Opinions

[jukus]

I work for a property management compnay and they have put me in charge of coming up with a way to go some what paperless. What they are wanting is a way to enter a work order for a particular client (i.e description of work to be done for maintenance). This would then need to be printed in a report to be faxed over to the workers. This info would then need to be pulled out and placed into an invoice where, where items could be entered such as items bought ets.

My company is willing to spend thousands for software, but I think it is insane. to do so.

I was thinking that surely this could be done in access. I have an understanding of how access works (forms, reports, tables, etc.) but I have never designed one like this.

It does not have to be complex and it does not have to have a lot of formulas, I was thinking that the total could be placed in field when the invoice info is entered. Only really calculation would be adding the total of the items.

Anyway is this something that can be done relatively easily by someone with my experience, or is this to complex.

Thank You for your time

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

There are two ways you can tackle it, interview everyone involved in the business, collect details of all the processes that are important to them, collect paperwork examples of data collection forms, (you can convert these into screen forms) the same for reports collect examples of the current paperwork forms. From this information you should look at producing a flow chart of the current processes.

Next you need to look at the data and group it into "entities" and work out how these entities would link together to form the basis of your database.

Before you get heavily involved in building the database, create a dummy database as quickly as possible, basically a set of forms demonstrating how you envisage the user interface to appear. Have everyone give you feedback on this dummy database and then you are probably in a position to start creating.

The second option is to find the process which is the most time consuming for everyone, and work on this process first, and the next slightly less important process carry on like this until you have a working system. This is probably the best route to take if you are starting out, however you will more than likely have to adopt the above strategy at sometime in the future.