Maybe you read my last message (Hammers and nails, Access and…? | Access JumpStart) and thought, “Yeah, Access does sound like a good fit for my business needs.” But what would you use it for exactly? If you’ve never used Access or any relational database software, what types of things would you build with it?
A great start is to think about what your business does in terms of groups of things.
Most businesses have customers. There’s one thing in a business that has many more things related to it.
A customer might have 1 or more orders. They have contact information of some kind, sometimes multiple people from one “customer” company. They pay you in some way – a payment method.
An order will have products or line items. It will have shipment information. It will have a payment status.
If you have any kind of system that has one piece of information that uses groups of other pieces of information, that can be a potential good candidate to use in Access.
For example, you can create a customer form to display a single customer with a subform to display header information for all their orders. Then you can have another form to display details for a single order and group the payments made that apply to that order displayed altogether on that form.
If you currently use spreadsheets to do this, you are missing out on a powerful and simple way to group and manage this information inside of Access instead. The beauty of Microsoft products is that you can continue to use the spreadsheets and actually pull data from relational tables to do your calculations and quick and dirty analysis in pivot tables, or you can output those calculations on reports and have them emailed to you each day if you want to keep tabs on things that way.
There are really endless possibilities.
Inventory systems, Order systems, Tracking systems, Scheduling systems. Perhaps you have all of these systems already in place within other software packages outside of Microsoft Office but they are all in their own databases that can be accessed with ODBC drivers. That would mean you could use Access to draw together different pieces of these systems together into the same report. Let’s say you need to link your billing system directly with your delivery system. You want to be able to automate billing customers based on when their order is delivered. You could utilize Access to look at the data in two separate systems and manage the billing events based on the delivery events.
I hope this gets your brain churning on ways you could use Access to simplify your own business. Let me know.