Daily Schedule, calendar year, tick off (check box) completed events, Excel or Access?

[rickm4484]

I have a business in which I track electronic systems that do daily, weekly, bi-monthly and customized scheduled check-ins. Presently, I use Word tables, which I manually set up for a calendar year, with the account numbers of the systems, and their respective dates and times of their expected check-in signal. I go to a website of a host service, where I can see the day's check-ins, and using my Word document, I place an "X" in the cell next to the account if I see it has checked in per it's schedule. If the check-in signal was not received as expected, I place an "O" in the cell next to the account and follow-up with the customer to find out if their system has some type of problem. This system has worked out well as I've been able to detect a problem with some of the systems before it goes on for too long. The host service will do this for me through their software, but they charge extra for this service. I check my accounts each day and it only takes 5 - 10 minutes of my time, so its' cost beneficial to do this myself. As a fail safe, these systems also alert the customers, locally with an audible indicator, of a failed check-in signal, but customers sometimes fail to act upon these alerts so I use this as a back-up.



The problem with doing this in Word is that I sometimes need to modify the account's scheduled check-in date/time, or I need to add new accounts, and it's labor intensive to manually add them with this arrangement. I'd like to have an entry form where I can add a new account, or modify an account's scheduled check-in, which will in turn place the account's data in the appropriate day of the week, per calendar day of the year. And I'd like to have a calendar driven daily screen, with all the accounts expected for that day, with checkboxes so I can tick off the successful receipt of the check-in signal. Upon checking off all the accounts that have checked in for that day, I'd like to have an alert or pop up that shows the accounts that have not checked in.

My question is, should I set this up in Excel or Access. I'm pretty good with both of these, but would like some recommendations from the forum as well.

Thanks for you help.

[ArviLaanemets]

It's doable both in Excel or in Access, so which option you choose depends mostly on your preferences.

Another thing is, that it looks like you read check-ins from certain web sites. Maybe is it possible to automate this part too? When it is possible to read check-ins using some web query, then maybe the best will be SQL Server database. Sheduled jobs read data from web and store in tables. Excel workbook reads view from SQL database and displays a report based on this view (using data validation lists to set query parameters).

[rickm4484]

Thanks ArviLaanemets, but the host website will not allow a raw data dump so SQL is not an option. I'm pretty sure it's doable in both Access and Excel as well, but not sure whether one over the other is easier to setup and use. I'm leaning toward Access as I think it can do the different screens with controls much better than in Excel.