Keeping track of funded accounts

E

Evi

Sorry about this. It's going to be complicated!

A friend runs a small charitable organisation which gets funding from
various sources. I've made her a database for her expenses which she has
used for 2 years.
Amongst other fields, she has a link to a table of Items on which money has
been spent.
Now she would like to add the facility to record her income. Normally this
would be another field in the database but there are complications.
She gets income from different charity funds so I need
a Funders Table

But the funders often give funds for a specific purpose. So the European
Lottery might give say £50 *towards* a new computer and £400 to pay for an
admin assistant for 4 months.
Another funder might give money for similar or different purposes while
another might just hand over a lump sum to be administered as necessary.

So I need a FundersItems table with links to the Items Table and links to
Funders Table

Should I link this FundersItems table to the Income Expenses table instead
of the Funders table?

She needs to show that she has spent amounts allocated for a specific
purpose on that item so there has to be some kind of link to my
Income/Expenses table. Or should there be? I'm just undecided what to link
to it.
Or should I use a completely different table to enter income and then mess
around with union queries or something to put the 2 tables together (sounds
really messy to me)

What do you think?
Evi
 
F

Fred

I thought I answered this but it didn't show up. Here's a shorter version.

One important point is that the "categories" defined by the donor's
conditions are going to be different than your friend's posting of expenses.
And so she will going through a "judgement call" process of associating
expenses with conditional donations. Let me give you two extreme / silly
but useful examples to illustrate this:

One donor gives money with the restriction that it be used for "worthy
purposes". And every penny that your friend spends if for a worthy purpose,
and thus every penny that your friend spends could be linked to that
donation.

One donation could specify that it be used for salaries for people with
green hair. The posting for payroll for that green haired executive
assistant will be under "office help payroll", not "pay for green haired
people".

And one big question is whether or not the system is to rigorously enforce
a concept that a given expense can't be used to satisfy 2 different
conditional donations.

If the answer to the question is "no", then I'd suggest an intermediate
linking table. And then she can make entries in it which associate whatever
expenses that she chooses to each conditional donation.

If the answer to the question is "yes" then things get complicated. The
intermediate table will probably have to become an "allocations" table where
each record is link plus $ figure which allocates a certain portion of an
expense to a restricted donation.

If the answer is "yes", then
 

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