I run small restaurant and I need program for Food
and paper cost analisys. In this moment every
calculation I have made is with Excel, but i have
some problems with it.
I need to incooperate food cost, receipes calculation,
paper cost, inventory entry, product mix entry (sold,
promo, emploee, waste).
With excel is ok but when I need to made some new
arangments with reports and when i have new product
promotion , the reports are not so good.
I have try with Acess but I am new in databasing.
Quite some years ago, I briefly worked (on some special features) on a
back-of-house restaurant system for a large chain -- they were on their
third fourth attempt, and had already spent hundreds of thousands, perhaps
millions, of dollars for development. (I later heard that they finally got
something usable on the _next_ attempt. It was worth their while, because
they expected it to save between one and two hundred thousand dollars a year
_at each location_ in the chain, and they had hundreds of locations.)
On the other hand, I have an Access colleague, who was a mechanical engineer
for a school district, who was "drafted" to create an Access database. He
did so without writing a single line of code (though the Wizards generated
some code for him) that tracked the district's food ordering, receipt, and
distribution for nearly ten years before they decided to replace it by
contracting to have a "commercial-grade" software package developed. And, as
far as I know, they are still using his (codeless) Access application while
the commercial-grade application is being developed for them.
His application surely doesn't do some of the things you propose, but does
much of what you want, and probably some things you don't include. Alas, it
belongs to the school district and I doubt they would be willing to "share".
Your best bet would be to find an application that does what you want --
freeware, shareware, or commercial. (The search engines are your friend, in
this respect.)
Your next best bet would be to find a developer with specific restaurant
experience (but not so much as to be biased toward "chain" or "enterprise"
level solutions) and see what it would cost for him/her to develop what you
need, training you along the way as to how it is being done, so that you can
maintain it in the future.
Third best, if neither of these proves feasible, would be to provide details
here of your information requirements, in hopes that between you and
participants, you can get enough help to get you going on developing your
own. But, you should be aware that you are going to have to invest a
significant amount of time in learning Access and developing the application
(and, in my experience, "spare" time is often in short supply for small
business owners).
Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP
