Building a Quoting system

[lafy]

Guys I need help!

I need to create a quoting system!
I work for manufacture company, we tried to upgrade to a new CRM system, 'Netsuite' but upper management decided to quit the project because it required more customizations then previously expected...

So on a daily basis I have to create quotes using excel.
I look at the prices printed out on paper and type in each option and price for each unit. I've had to do this for 8 months and the company doesn't seem very eager to change this process.



I attempted to build a quoting system in Excel, using simple lookup and if statements. But what I need in my quotes was machine option filtering. If I select a model I need all options filtered based on the model selected. Each machine has 9 different options.

I spoke if our IT guy and he told me to look into access.
Can you guys point me in the right directions?

Thanks!

[rpeare]

This is a very generic question but what you're asking to be done is exactly what a relational database is used for. If you are manufacturing you may have a certain machine that can be built (as you indicated) but it may have many parts that are 'optional' or interchangable. So a customer can say order a water pump of a certain model but the component parts that go into it would be different based on how heavy duty the usage was expected to be.

All of this can be done in access, if you give more information about how your estimate decision tree goes we can give you more guidance.