Hi All,

I am working on a database where the sole purpose will be to enter numbers given to a District Manager by the regional managers to track their numbers by quarter. They want the DB to retain the data each quarter, but start clean the next quarter. So basically they want to be able to archive each quarter's data, and start fresh each new quarter. I'm scratching my head a bit, because I know how to design the DB assuming they didn't need to retain the previous data. I've designed some Access DBs before, and was Microsoft Certified in Access 2000, but I've become a bit rusty.

Thanks!

why archive stuff off
'just' define what the time periods are
stuff the data into wahtever table(s) you require
then extract the data as required
given a good enough design then you can also run compratives against other time periods


eg this quarter 2011 against last quarter 2011, this quarter 2011, this quarter 2010 and so on

flushing the data doesn't make sense unless you have some other problem such as available storage space

Ok so are you saying make a table for each quarter or am I missing something?

No, and yes you probably are missing something:-
have one table for all your sales data
define a table elsewhere which describes the periodic element (eg quarters)

then extract the data as required according to the periodic table

at a guess I think you'd be better off defining financial months, rather than quarters (or as well as quarters) so you can solve what ever periodic time series question your users are going to throw at you.