Hmm: I'm not sure there is a one-size-fits-all solution for this.
You will need to think very specifically about what you need to achieve
here, and set up the tables and relationships according. Then you can begin
to think about how to best interface this with forms and subforms, and how
to print out reports.
Examples of things to think about:
- What is an 'appointment'? What does it involve, e.g. exactly one staff
member + exactly one client? Or could there be times when an appointment
involves multple staff members and/or multiple clients? (This will affect
the way you tie appointments to your table of clients, and whether employees
may need to be recorded in the same table as clients but marked with a
special role.)
- Do you need to differentiate between what's scheduled and what actually
occurred? There is a difference (e.g. when a client doesn't show, or when 5
clients were scheduled for meeting, but fewer/more actually turned up.)
- Do you need to handle recurring appointments? With varying frequencies?
And perhaps no termination date?
- Would it be better to do this with a shared Outlook/Exchange calendar, or
to do it in Access?
- How is your billing organised? Separate invoice for each appointment, or
periodic billing (e.g. for all uninvoiced appointments in a month/quarter)?
- Is the basis of billing purely the hourly rate of the people involved? Or
is there more to it, so that the database cannot batch these automatically
and they must be entered manually?
- Do you need to track payments received as well as billed? Taxes included?
Periodic statements? Or do you need to export something in a format that
your accounting program can invoice? (You certainly don't want to write an
entire accounting program in Access.)
Hopefully some of those questions will help you to think clearly about this.
