I'm semi new at this, been working on a solution for flying club aircraft rental payment tracking.

What I've come up with in theory is tracking individual flights like a check register. My reporting period is based on the calendar month, and I usually have a starting and stopping meter reading that everything falls into for between that month. Though I guess that could also be the lowest and highest value of a particular months records.

So what I need to see if I can grasp is, it sounds like a check register would be a database within a database. Or would it be a report/layout that would do this?

My data consists of

Flight Date

Who rented it,

the meter reading when they started,

the meter reading when they returned,

anything they spent becomes a credit

how much they owe - based on the rental rate per hour

Then the admin side, being "did they pay, and pay in full, how did they pay (check, credit card), if check, get the check # field and move it to a deposit slip (which is another report I imagine), and then when that deposit slip is printed, it will tick a field so that the item is not redeposited again the next time.

The thing being there are different aircraft, which sounds like it would be another table.

Right now I have it all done for doing the membership, I've prefixed all the fields related to that as "Memb_", and figure the rental stuff would be "Ops_", and the aircraft data which consists of the tail #, owner/lessor, tax information, contact, inspection dates, etc. would be something else.

Am I on the right track?

Hi there, yes you are on track as a student pilot, i understand what it is you are doing.

You would definitely have a equipment table (planes) you would have your people (pilots) you also would have a join table that links the data (log) basically is your Hobbs in & out. date & pilot & plane.

From the context of planes you can see who flew the plans and it's current Hobbs

Your pilots would have an "credit/debit" accounts where they deposit & withdraw funds.

you create an typical invoice (invoice) for the (pilot) based upon your (log) that is then you can apply (credits) from their account. It would be a deduction from their account and a deposit into the payment file for the invoice.

Hope this helps.