MS Access Calendar modifications?

[Seroki]

So I found the great Calendar here on this forums and it seems to meet a good deal of my current project for my wife.

A bit of background my Wife insist on paying the bills well she is always losing some part of it or missing the due date and other some thing where we are seeing late charges and increased interest rates because of it. And me just finishing my first Access basic course thought I could whip her up a access Calendar and found my self quickly over my head. i set up the tbl and frm with no issues but she wanted a calendar so it acts like her wall calendar.

So similar to the Wide Screen Calendar the pop up at the beginning is great to instead of appointments/Patients I bills. and have it populate on the calendar. selecting a day would then bring up the activities of the day and a link to a form to enter new activities. and the like...
so what I would like is to enter all of our bills so they show up on the calendar and so we can set a recurring toggle so they propagate thru out the upcoming months.

I believe I may need a table for each account so i can track the history.
I am thinking that is why it was not done for the Patients portion as it would become bulky...

Well if any one can point out any tip and or trick let me know. till then I will keep hacking at it till i can get what i need.

Thanks for reading.

[GKJR]

First of all from what I can tell you don't need separate tables for each account. You should have a table for your Accounts and then a One-to-Many relationship with your Bill Payments table. The Bill Payments table is the one your calendar will portray.

I think since you already have the calendar representing the bills that you manually enter into the table, all you need to do is create a procedure for duplicating the due date every month for a specified period of time. This could be done with VBA using Object Variables such as Database and Recordsets. You will also need to use regular variables and looping with logic tests, but these are pretty standard programming tools. It may take a while to get the hang of it, but the knowledge has been invaluable to me in my programming history with Access. I don't think there is any other way to do it with Access, but I may be wrong.

On a side note, there are a lot of calendar apps these days that allow you to create recurring dates. If this is more of an exercise for you to test your skills I can appreciate that, but if you just want to get the job done I would recommend looking into some pre-packaged calendar apps that you can get on your phone or other device.

[Seroki]

Thank you for you help.
My wife does not trust phone apps as many seem to have either bloat ware or spy ware.
sooooo...
next it is a bit of a test of my skills next year I have a huge project I am not currently prepared for and I hope by doing this small project I can increase my real skills and my confidence for the big job coming.

[jforbes]

Typically, the Calendar would be mostly for display purposes. Showing a Calendar Form is just to put the user at ease by displaying the Data in an easily recognized format. You could easily show the same data in a weekly format or yearly format.

What makes a scheduling or tracking application work is how the data is stored. GKJR is addressing this. Another resource that might be of benefit to you is http://bytes.com/topic/access/insigh...ble-structures

As long as the data is stored in a logical and normalized manner, you should be able to develop routines to deal with reoccurrence and the other things that you might want to do with your Tasks/Dates and Accounts.

Once you have the basics of your data sorted out, then I would take another look at the calendar control and see how best to make it work for you giving your data structure.

One last note: Calendar Forms can be tricky as the calendar came way before computers, so getting them to work correctly on a computer can be difficult. If Computer Programmers were around before there were Calendars, then it would be likely a month would consist of six weeks of six days each, and a year would only have ten months with the rest of the days ignored and we would reboot it on January 1st.

[Seroki]

so I have put the calendar in to the wish list and have already started down the path here suggested. I think it is more important to get data in and reports out at this stage in my understanding .. and worry about pretty GUI's later.

so I am trying to calulate ending balance ..

Ebalance: iff[Interest]>0,[Bbalance]-([AmountPaid]-([Bbalance]*[Interest]))

so i check if there is interest as that would earmark it and a payment vs a utility bill.
then i take the B(egining)balance and find out how much i paid in interest then i subtract that amout from the amount paid and take the results from the Bbalance and store this in the E(nding)balance.

I tried to put this into the same table but i get a error.
I have Ebalance as a field in my table and i use expression builder and placed this as the Default value. and I get a syntax error "Operand without an Operator"

I don't know if it due to pulling the data fields from the current table do i need to move this to just a form out put but i need this out put to store for next month.... uhg i am lost in the room with the light on..

[GKJR]

It is not advisable to create a field in your table that stores the balance. I have made several accounting applications and I simply store each transaction as an amount along with other pertinent details (date, paid to, description, etc.). My report that portrays my data has a sum text box in either the header or footer to show the balance after all of the transactions are taken into account, including the beginning balance which should be entered as a transaction. You are asking for trouble by keeping a calculated running balance as a field in your table.