Seeking suggestions for program design

[Shyama83]

Hello...

I am currently working on a simple Accounting Application.
It will basically keep a record of the company's accounts and their balances, as well as allowing the posting of journal vouchers (debits and credits).
Having that as the 'input' side, there will also be reporting mechanisms, such as journal voucher reports, expense, income statement, account movement summary... etc..

I am almost complete with the inputting side... however, I need some suggestions on how to keep track of the account balances... in certain reports, the account balance or movement will be shown for each month... I'm still not sure of the optimum way to approach this. Here are some of my thoughts:

- Store only the balance of the account when it is created in the system, then generate the movement by querying through the journal-entries table, summing up all credits and debits for each months...

- Create a database that will store opening and ending balance of each account on month end (the table will be updated via a macro that will be executed when the application loads).

Does one of these suggestions make sense or am I on the wrong track on how to do this?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions/help.

 

[Rich]

Unless you want to spend a lot of time building it, buy an existing package

 

[Shyama83]

hehehe ... I know.. my company is already working on that... but it seems that it'll will be a lengthy process and they need some sort of simple application to help them with their records at the moment.

I'm not going to create anything complex.. they might only use this for 6 months..

 

[gemma-the-husky]

I tend to agree with Rich

It depends exactly what you are trying to do, of course, but this is not trivial

eg, for my own use, i wrote from scratch a fairly decent NL including reversing journals etc, which took about 2 to 3 days in total. (I am actually a qualified accountant, so I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve)

As it was just for my own use, I didn't finish it to my normal presentation level, and just manually fixed any occasional problems that occurred from time to time - For more general use by others, this would have needed substantially more development, to include the necessary level of robustness

Basic accounting systems are fairly standard, so unless you really need to do this yourself for some other reason, it would certainly be more economic to buy a ready made system.

 

[Shyama83]

The more I think about it, the more complex it seems... though at first I thought it was do-able in 2 weeks :/ actually.. I never created an access application before... that is why it took me more time than expected to get things together (almost 2 weeks now).. plus I haven't programmed for a while now..
Like I said, they are in the process of purchasing an accounting system... they just asked me to develop a temporary system so that they can work with because they will be opening subsidiaries soon, and it will be bothersome for them to continue keeping manual records on excel.

 

[neileg]

Buy a cash book!

Seriously, why not look at Microsoft Office Accounting Express. It's free.

 

[MagicMan]

Actually, Microsoft Office Accounting 2008 Express is more robust and also supports import of data from spreadsheets. The templates are provided by microsoft.
Bob
It is simple to set up and use. Give it a try.

 

[maxmangion]

here is the link for the suggested application

 

[Shyama83]

Thanks.. I'm downloading it now.