Comparing purchases across groups over time

[TheFuelGuy]

Hi everyone,


I'm hoping someone will be able to share some insight on a project i'm undertaking. As TheFuelGuy I am responsible for monitoring and assessing fuel purchase data on a weekly basis in our corporation. Totalling nearly 1million dollars worth of fuel purchases each month across ~3000 vehicles, there is a lot of data coming in. I would like to be able to create a database where i can upload our weekly .Dat (text, tab delimited) file and have access sort through the purchases line by line, and tally up a sum per department. Finished product, I would like to have graphical representations of a 12 month history in two different views: corporation monthly fuel expendature and a historical departmental fuel expendature view.

In my attempts so far, i have two tables set up and have run one sucessful query. One table is simply a list of departments, which i have linked to one of our weekly .Dat files. When i run the query, everything that i want is there: i have a sum per department, as well as a transaction count.

I run in to problems when i try to add the next .Dat file. With my limited skillset i'm unable to include the historical aspect to my report. There must be a way to have a running link as opposed to having several single links..
I hope i'm being clear enough with my question and intent. If there is anyone out there who is willing to help me tackle this, i'd be greatly appreciative!

~TheFuelGuy

[pbaldy]

I would be importing each .dat file into a table so that you had the activity all in one place. Then you can query that table to get any time period's data.