Is Access the Right Choice For Forecasting?

[jlawson6589]

Hello forum. Hopefully you can help me some with the decision I have before me. My basic question is should I consider using Access to design a forecasting tool/budgeting tool?

I consider myself a power user when it comes to Excel, but have relatively no background in Access. I manage a financial department for a government contractor and part of my role is designing and maintaining the forecasting and budgeting tools, among other tools, we use to do our standard job. This has become quite a bit harder recently with my team taking on the added task of forecasting revenue on these programs for the company, and not just for our government customer. Both deliverables cover the same programs, but cover different level of detail, different reporting periods, and different timelines that need to be covered. The level of detail that has been needed has lead to me designing two separate large workbooks for each program and spending the majority of my time updating these workbooks. I think Access might be the answer to consolidating these two workbooks into one and managing the extremely large amount of data the posses. I would just like some confirmation that Access could be the answer before dedicating my nights to learning how to use it and developing the new, hopefully better, tool I need. Any guidance you can give me would be much appreciated.

 

[shg]

Welcome to the board.

Having no knowledge of Access, I say NO!!

I can't suggest where you keep your data, but Excel has excellent tools for analysis.

 

[xenou]

Access has a steep learning curve. I'm not sure but it may be better to start with something simpler (like your typical College Course or Book Inventory such as you get in Databases 101). You could end up with a real mess on your hands - unless you have a natural skill or lots of smarts. I generally recommend a course, or if that's not possible at least a few months reading up on database theory fundamentals (Database Design for Mere Mortals comes to mind). And some SQL. And then (last but not least) some study of how to create and work with Access forms and reports. In short, it would probably require some serious investment of time learning the ropes if you want to jump into this with Access.

That said, I use Access with budgeting and I find it very useful to handle the raw data. I push some of it out to Excel so it's both/and (Access and Excel). I really don't know if I could imagine maintaining all the data in Excel - I sure wouldn't want to. I run some of it through an ETL process to summarize it at different levels (customer, product group, month, year). In essence, it becomes a "data warehouse lite" for me with Access, with parts of it output to excel for charting and analysis.

 

[SydneyGeek]

I'll second xenou.

Access is great for holding the forecast data, and slicing / dicing for return to Excel. Use Excel for the number crunching; that's where its strengths are. If you need the capacity, or have to consolidate multiple workbooks, use Access for that.

Denis

 

[jlawson6589]

Thank you all very much for the replies. I think I have gotten enough feedback to look further into Access. I was thinking it would work as a good storage place for non changing data such as employee names, rates, and charge codes, and it would benefit me if I integrate it with Excel. The good news is I do not need to have my new tool finished until 11/20/2011. Hopefully that will be enough time to get up to speed and create. Thanks again for everyones time and input!