Access concepts and applications

Access

Microsoft Access is a very useful tool for creating small and medium scale databases for organizations. It is also an environment that can be used to develop whole applications such as accounting systems - from the user interfaces to the code that contains the business logic. This paper will discuss two sample databases: a payroll system and a contact management system.

A payroll system is used by companies to track employee salaries, taxes, and deductions. It is very useful for automating the tedious calculations involved in determining an employee's net pay, or how much the company owes the employee for services rendered. The larger the company, the more employees it needs to pay and the greater the need to have a fully automated system. For this system, I've created a simple database containing two tables: Employee and Salary. The Employee table contains basic employee information such as employee number, name, date hired, and title. The Salary table contains payroll-related information like social security number, salary, billing rate, and deductions. For every payroll cycle (ex. monthly), it is only necessary to calculate the net pay for each employee using the formula Net Pay = Salary - Taxes - Deductions. I've created a Payroll Report in the Reports section of the database to demonstrate this. Instead of doing the calculations manually for all employees, the system can do it automatically.