Monthly/Quarterly Returns: Expressing Date?

[PeteCresswell]

A "quarterly return" is the decimal amount that an investment returned
over a given three-month period.

The periods end on Mar, Jun, Sep, Dec

Seems like there are a couple of ways to link a return with a quarter:

1) Year and quarter number. e.g. 2003-02 would be the second
quarter of 2003.

2) A date. Quarter 2 of 2003 could be represented by either
06/31/2003 or 06/01/2003 - with the understanding that what either
date really means is the entire quarter ending 6/31.

Right now, I'm partial to option B of #2. Using the first day in
the month gets around different number of days in months.

Arithmetic seems simpler now that we can just do a DateAdd("m", Date1,
Date2).
But it's not a true representation - wheras

2002 01
2002 02
2002 03
2002 04 for quarters

and the same thing, but with 01-12 for months is.
Anybody been down this road before?
If so, will I live to regret approach #2?

[deko]

> A "quarterly return" is the decimal amount that an investment returned

over a given three-month period.

The periods end on Mar, Jun, Sep, Dec

Seems like there are a couple of ways to link a return with a quarter:

1) Year and quarter number. e.g. 2003-02 would be the second
quarter of 2003.

2) A date. Quarter 2 of 2003 could be represented by either
06/31/2003 or 06/01/2003 - with the understanding that what either
date really means is the entire quarter ending 6/31.

Right now, I'm partial to option B of #2. Using the first day in
the month gets around different number of days in months.

Arithmetic seems simpler now that we can just do a DateAdd("m", Date1,
Date2).
But it's not a true representation - wheras

2002 01
2002 02
2002 03
2002 04 for quarters

and the same thing, but with 01-12 for months is.
Anybody been down this road before?
If so, will I live to regret approach #2?

I did something like that before and Datepart("q" ) seemed to work fine.

SELECT SUM([Amount]) AS Q3Total, [TxAcct_ID]
FROM tblTxJournal
WHERE (DatePart("q",[TxDate])=3 AND Year([TxDate])=QryPrm("frm3",
"cbx3Year")) AND ([TxType_ID]=QryPrm("frm3", "cbx3TxType") OR QryPrm("frm3",
"cbx3TxType")=0)
GROUP BY [TxAcct_ID];