Using forms to add new data in an existing client table

[LightningJack75]

Good day.

In a church scenario where you have many congregation members, how can I set up a form to capture the tithes & offering that we receive from Church members on a monthly bases in order to accumulate the total?

Entries forms must also have a calendar entry that will be the primary entry "VALUE" in order to capture data according thereby which would also be used to sort entries in queries and reports.

[rpeare]

Are you asking about structure?

You'd want a table for your members with a primary key (autonumber works fine)

Then you'd want another table for offerings, the offerings table would have a primary key of it's own (PK again, autonumber) with a foreign key to your member table, in other words if john smith is member number 1 you would store only the 1 in your offerings table then if you needed to pull any information about john smith you would link to the member table to get his information. In the offering table you would also need the offering date, the amount and whatever other fields are offering specific.

I don't know the difference between offerings and tithes or if they are synonymous to you, I guess tithes would be a recurring offering? It's possible to set that up, and to send out reminders to people who tithe but if you rely on the members to remember then really what you're after is fairly simple and the two tables should be enough.

If you're recording what type of offering it was (tithe, offering, other type possible?) you'd want another table similar to your member table that had the donation type with a PK and store the FK in your offerings table.

[LightningJack75]

Thanks for the reply.

Firstly, a tithe is a tenth of a person's monthly wages. In the Jewish and Christian faith we accept this as practice in obedience and submission to God.

So what happens is that when someone gives his tithes, in most churches they are given an receipt to show that their tithes was received however we don't do this.

What we would like to do though is to be able to capture the tithes received in order to go paperless because we use to much paper as it is and for the few people who would like a receipt for their tithes received, can receive an email which should be generatable from Microsoft Access 2010.

The mayor thing is that we want to be able to capture the tithes that must be linked to the date chosen. This would also be good so that we could capture this whole year up and until now.

I hope that this is much more clear now...

Thanks...

[NTC]

Its really quite straight forward. But it is database design. Fundamentally you need a Contribution Table: Member name, Amount, Date

To become more elegant, and not have to retype the member name each time and make typos - you probably want a Member Table too. then make that Member name field in the Contribution table into a look up field type.

With some data in the database; summing a amount for a member by a date range is done via a report - which in turn can be sent as a pdf email attachment.

[LightningJack75]

Ok so how do I set this up?

I do have the database with some names in it but I have no idea how to do and or link the "Contributions Table". I have a problem with adding multiple info to existing congregation members with the new dates...

[rpeare]

I've sent you a PM about this project you can review.

In terms of the question you posted last. Typically the way this would be set up for most people is a simple form/subform. Where the Main form's data source would be a table/query relating to your congregation members. The subform would be related to their dontation/tithe dates. The link between the two would be the member ID. The gist of a form/subform arrangement is that when you enter data on the subform a link (in this case your Member ID) is automatically established rather than having to enter a person for each line you enter, you can set it up to search for a person, then enter their donation/tithe amount and move on.