PC - database question..templates? business

dizzyliz

Hi

my husband wants me to help set up a stock list, purchases and sales spreadsheet/database for him for an ebay business adventure he has planned - im not sure if this will go anywhere but i will try my best to help him out as he has not much computer knowledge so i want to make this easy and painless, I am an analyst myself but never started anything up from scratch or dealt with sales/purchases information, i'm more of an excel geek than access.

I think Access database is the only way forward to not have all this manual process he will have to do - i have looked at some templates online but they are not what i need (from microsoft).

are there any business sales/purchases and stock update kind of software (free) or database templates i could use you know of?

thanks, any info will be greatly appreciated
Liz x

paddyrg

What you're after is a basic ERP by the sounds of things, ERPLY is quite good, you don't need to use all of the functionality and it might get you going without installing stuff.

Getting into your own access systems from scratch could be more hassle than its worth. Data is no use if it's hidden, unverifiable, etc. Spreadsheets may be easier to trust and quicker to knock up.

I_have_spoken

Until the business takes off, surely a simple ledger book from W H Smiths will do?

Once volumes grow, you'll likely want to register as a pro-seller on Ebay then IIRC you get access to online s/w for inventory management. Have a look at Ebay itself - http://pages.ebay.co.uk/selling_manager_pro/

For the accounting side plus VAT, tax etc, have a look at the online providers - http://www.crunch.co.uk/ for example, I'm sure there's others.

dizzyliz

thanks for your replies, great comments.

i am still a bit against spreadsheets alone because of updating stock lists - at the moment this is what he has and table of stock items and their quantity which he changes the stock of 5 to a 4 when one is sold - to me this is too manual, and then he records the same item in a sold list.

he is registered as a pro seller and uses a lot of the ebay pages in terms of sold items and all the data that comes with that, along with paypal - but its the combining of the purchases, stock and then the actual sales.

looked at the erply - this looks really good! maybe yes too much detail within it and like you say you can probably just use what you need from it. - thanks.
i might still have a look around for something similar but simpler - shame its not easy enough to create in access database, i can write queries, create simple forms, reports - its just the workings and relationships that i get confused with - i need to have it all working correctly - something i have never done before.

thanks

paddyrg

Access is great, better than it gets credit for much of the time, but it is easy to make misleading apps. Think of it like a word processor, without knowing written English you can make good looking gibberish, same if you don't understand ER structures properly in a database. Seen it all too often in industry, people making decisions based on faulty data where they made their own complicated, fancy looking system with business rules built in... But based on bad data. In a spreadsheet they'd have eyeball sanity checks but not when they hid the data and the reports looked official!

dizzyliz

it sounds so easy though - i just want to be able to say :
you have spent this much, and you have made this much in a period of time. but you also have this "up to date" stock list of quantities and cost.

i think maybe its time to give up and get a web based system to do it all for him, but a simple one thou

thanks
any other ideas welcomed

Amontylado

Does anyone have any experience of Crunch online accounting mentioned above? I am looking for something to help my son manage his (so far) one-man business - web design and on-line marketing so no stock to handle.

I'm not a book-keeper so I have been doing his books with simple spreadsheets up to now but we feel he needs to move on to something more formal as he's about to become VAT registered and maybe take on a couple of staff. I tried out Sage Instant but it was much too complicated for me (and for the size of his business) so we thought better to use someone who knows what they're doing!

Other possibilities we're looking at are cleveraccounts.com and duport.co.uk. All about £60 - £80 per month.
I'd be very interested in any comments. Many thanks.

dizzyliz

for my previous query on access db - i have found a Microsoft template to manage all we need i think!! - may need some adjusting, hopefully wont break it - but if you are interested : its called

Desktop Product inventory database - Microsoft office templates

the next steps will web page creation and linking it to this database for stock etc. i think - its all new and exciting!

paddyrg

By all means give it a go! Just remember you have to factor dates and year-endings, etc. That's when it can start getting complicated.

Also, something to be cautious of is mixing up transactional and static data. When an item is sold, you want to decrement a stock count but also add a line to a transactions table, and have that balance. Easy enough, but then what happens when you add stock? Get a returned item? Increment the stock table plus adding a negating row to the transactions table (you can't delete history), and stay in sync...

Have fun with it, but please bear the above in mind. People used to pay me a lot of money for this stuff, seemingly simple things can be more complex when you manage the edge cases.

dizzyliz

thanks for the advice - i didn't even think of that!
well i have lots to think about now, its good to know these things come up and i can prepare for it although not sure if this system can do that yet

thank you