Hi from an excited newbie in Access and Excel (1 Viewer)

Hi everyone,

My name is Lois, I am 47 and I run a driving school here in London. I ended up petrified of tax returns. I went solo in May 05 having done about 11 years with a large national driving school (when I employed an accountant) and then serving just 18 months as a Police Officer before I decided I preferred to be self employed and returned to teaching people to drive.

I have just received help from a charity for low income earners who are struggling with their tax returns. They have helped me complete 3 years tax returns that were outstanding. I still have 09/10 to do and intend doing this very soon rather than leaving it to the last minute.

But for next year I want to put a system in place that will automate so much of the figure work which I hate. I also hope to get some really useful data in the future such as:
What percentage of my pupils are male and under 21
What is the average no of lessons that a woman over 35 takes to pass her driving test
What percentage of my pupils found me online
etc etc

I am also using Excel in combination with Access and have so far (very surprisingly as I am new to using both programs) managed to set up a relational database from which I can obtain all the lessons carried out between certain dates. If I run my query from the beginning of the tax year (6th April) to the end (5th April) it produces a result showing two fields: LessonPrice (in which I have entered the price for half an hour for my various different types of driving lessons) and x30Mins in which I have entered the multiple of 30 mins of each lesson ie. 3 for a 1.5 hour lesson. This data will be entered by me at the end of each working week.

I can then copy and paste this into Excel and get it to multiply all the A fields by all the B fields and then total the column C to get my turnover for the year.

I am very pleased with the progress I've made so far but already have questions that I have been unable to find answers to online.

So thought I'd sign up to this forum in the hope that I might be able to get the help I need and, who knows, in the future be able to help other users.

I am very excited at the moment at just how powerful these programs are and am looking forward to being able to start adding data at the end of next week so may need some help to get that to be a reality.

Lois (Tangent)


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Welcome to the forum Tangent

A very clear and focused description of your position so far.

I suspect with that sort of clear accurate thinking you might get on well with access and excel.

PS all that stuff you do in Excel... can be done in access automatically that's probably the next thing you want to develop.

I wish you were right about the clear and accurate thinking Lightwave LOL
It doesn't feel like I think that way to me most of the time

I did try to do the sums in Access but found it way beyond my capabilities!
Thanks for the welcome