Hi all

I work at an accountants and I have been given the task of making a new system .

They want it to be able to keep a record of all invoices and payments recieved for each client of which we have approx 300. I'm not sure what is the best way of doing this. Do I

a) Make a huge spreadsheet with a worksheet per client. This would be a huge task and I can't see it being user friendly.

b) Create a database to do it. My prefered option. It has been a couple of years since I created one but I'm not sure as to the layout I would use if I took this path. Obviously whack all the client records in a table, but would I put details about payments & invoices in another table and then make a query to find everything and report to make it look pretty?

Something which would do something like this but for 300+ people...

c) Purchase a basic accounting system, which can be done for trivial cost and almost certainly much cheaper than the cost of developing and running it yourself.

I'll second dportas' notion... You can buy a number of first rate accounting packages for under $500 US that will serve a busines that size well, and allow enormous room for growth. Unless you have very specific special accounting needs (such as the Dingle requirements for CPAs), there is absolutely no reason to write yet another accounting package!

-PatP