I finally "got religion" as far as using join tables a little over a year ago, but -- having developed some bad habits with clunky but serviceable relationships -- still have some structure/design questions.

We are a book business and, in the old days, our way of assigning costs to individual services for a book (printing, editing, etc) was to just fill out an enormous worksheet with a blank field for every service we offer. Clunky, but it made it very easy to "look back" from a related table and grab a service's cost.

Since implementing a join table structure to tie services to a book, I can't see how I'd easily "look back" to grab a single service's cost from a related table (that is, without a huge array of table occurrences with filter/query relationships built in).

I'm attaching an image that shows my problem. Any advice, or at least a verbal thrashing?

ServiceCostChart.pdf

I can't say I fully understand your structure, but it seems you haven't "got religion" all the way. Your accounting log should also be broken down to individual items - either in the same table, or in another 'line items' type table.

Then it's a simple matter of connecting the item to another occurrence of the pricelist table. Since each item has a BookID and a ServiceTypeID, and so does each price, those are your matchfields.

Thanks very much, comment. This will help me get even further out of the mire...