Hourly Rates and Tables

[Karl Burrows]

I have a simple time sheet I created in Access to track time and materials
and then to create an invoice at the end of the month. I am getting ready
to increase my hourly rate and charge over time for certain clients who have
abused my willingness to work any hour of the day. Anyway, I have a table
with basic customer info with a field for the hourly rate. If I increase
this rate, it updates all records for that client to the new rate. How can
I modify this setup to allow me to change the hourly rate going forward
without affecting any previous records?

Thanks!

 

[John Vinson]

I have a simple time sheet I created in Access to track time and materials
and then to create an invoice at the end of the month. I am getting ready
to increase my hourly rate and charge over time for certain clients who have
abused my willingness to work any hour of the day. Anyway, I have a table
with basic customer info with a field for the hourly rate. If I increase
this rate, it updates all records for that client to the new rate. How can
I modify this setup to allow me to change the hourly rate going forward
without affecting any previous records?

Thanks!

This is a case where you *do* want to (apparently) redundantly copy
the rate (or the calculated total) to your billing table. Rather than
calculating the fee by multiplying hours by the rate from the rates
table and just displaying it, store the calculated value in your
table. You can run an Update query to fill in all your existing
records (using the old rate of course).

John W. Vinson[MVP]

 

[Guest]

Hi Karl,

A similar example is shown in the sample Northwind database. Take a look at
the relationships view (Tools > Relationships). Notice how the UnitPrice is
stored in the Products table and in the Order Details table. When you
increase the price of a product, you only change the UnitPrice in the
Products table. The corresponding UnitPrice in the Order Details table
represents the price of the product at the time of the sale.


Tom Wickerath
Microsoft Access MVP

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