Would Excel or Access be the best solution for me?

[beelzebubba]

I need to revise my company's monthly sales reporting process. We currently
use an Excel spreadsheet, but it was created four years ago and lacks some of
the functionality I'd like.

I'm either going to start with a clean sheet and create a new Excel report
or set up a 'sales tracking database' in Access. I'm a novice Access user,
although I do have the manual and understand the basic concepts.

My company has almost 300 store locations and each will have its monthly
sales figures recorded in this report. In addition, each location pays
royalties based on a percentage of the sales figure. The percentage isn't
the same for all stores.

Reporting from this data is critical (and why I am uncertain which program
is the best solution). I need to see the data by month, by month with
year-to-date figures, percentage increases/decreases compared to previous
months, etc. I also need to see the data sorted in BOTH alphabetical order
and store number order (two separate sheets in Excel was my plan to
accomplish that).

So....is a new Excel workbook the way to go? 300 lines down and 13 across
for months and totals. Or would Access provide me more reporting
flexibility and store information long-term for future comparisons?

Thanks in advance for your input!

 

[Jim Thomlinson]

I personally would use Access for that with XL pivot tables as one option for
my reporting. That being said you will need to have some ideas of how to
structure a database. You would want one table for your locations and one for
the sales transactions (quite possibly this is over simplified depending on
what you intend to do). How do you intend to get the sales data into this.
Typed in by hand or downlaoded from some other system. If you are not
familiar with databases then your only option is to go with a strictly XL
solution but I think XL will be a bit of an up hill battle.