Report/Sub summaries

[himesly]

I'm newer to Filemaker Pro and am trying to build a database that will help me track my companies spending. We do this by tracking PO's, and while I have everything set up, i can not for the life of me get the Report/Summary function to work for me. I've never done a report before, and I can't find anything helpful on the net to explain them to me.

I have a database that contains the following fields:

PO#

Project

Character

Quantity

Part#/Description

Amount each

Total line item

Date created

Basically i want to be able to have a report and search in the following ways.

1. Search by project, with a project spending total

2. Search by project, broken by character with a character spending total

3. Search by month with a department total (note: the department identification is directly in the PO# field.)

I can't figure out how to make these work. I'm sure it is simple, but i just don't understand the report/summary/sub-summary set up. If anyone can point me in the right direction to find an answer, or help me out i would appreciate it.

Thank you,

Jess

[Reed]

The first thing you'll probably want to do is break this up into at least a couple of files (tables)

You might want one table for parts, one for purchase orders (invoices), one for line items, and one for customers. (If there are multiple customers in the same company, you might want to split that up too)

I can't remember a good place to find an example of this in FM6. Filemaker Business Tracker is really good, but it was built in v7.

On second thought, I just did a search of the forums and pulled up this post

Having your data at least somewhat normalized will help with reporting. Take a look at this and let me know if you have more questions.

Dana