Creating a budget database

[woodpecker]

attached is the example of what I am thinking for this database


what I am asking is if this is a good start to create this database.
I welcome your feedback and thank you for taking the time to look this overbudget database.pdf
should I make one table or a table for each budget area and create a relationship to each one from the main table

[Robyn_P]

Hey, (I really need to stop playing around on here and do my own work, but hey ho). I'm not sure what I'm looking at in the PDF. From what I can see, I would have two tables. One for the expenditure catagories tblCatagories with fields ID, Category, BudgetAmount). Link this in a one to many with an tblExpenditure with fields (ID, CatagoryID, Item, Debit, Credit). The balance field you should calculate. The I guess you need another one for the incoming money. Hope that helps as a start.

[CJ_London]

I would include debit/credit as one field - positive for debit and negative for credit but that is a personal preference. Overall I would agree with Robyn for table structure but you might want to clarify what budget means - for a week? a year? For example groceries are probably a weekly expense whilst rent monthly, utilities quarterly etc. And some expenditure will be seasonal - you spend more on gas/electric in the winter than the summer (at least you do in the UK!) so you may need a separate table to store the budget 'profile'.

You may also need a field in the expenditure table to detail from which account the expenditure was incurred. And another to be able tor transfer funds from one account to another. And you probably want to have cash as an 'account' - your budget comparison will go wildly out if your withdraw £100 and then spend it on groceries/dining out.

It is not necessary to have subforms for all the other categories - what if you add another one? are you going to modify your form?

Suggest you have a main form with two subforms - the first to show a summary of total expenditure against total budget by expense so you can monitor how things are going, the other to show the individual transactions which can be filtered for expense type and also used to add new expenditure.