Extracting data for layouts

[TattyDon]

Hi, I'm not sure whether this is the right forum for this so apologies if not.

I have been designing a database for a while now and it's fairly complex but since I am self taught, I am sure that I am using bad techniques.

I have one table which lists all my financial transactions. Fields include: Financial Year, Account ID, description, amount.

To work out how much i have left in each acount I do the following.

Run a script to identify how many accounts are presently used



For each account (loop)

load a layout showing transactions against that account so that I can get the total amount.

Add total amount to a running total

End loop

Sometimes this process gets even more complex if I need to get a total by account for each financial year or something.

So my question is whether there is an easier way of getting totals like this? In the above example, it loads 7 layouts (one for each account)plus the original to identify the number of accounts to get the totals for each account.

I am also using go to related record type searches (with individual tables) rather than the perform find function - Anyone know whether that is also a mistake/

I guess alot of us self teachers find ways of doing something and just do it when there might be a much faster way of achieving it...

Cheers

Tatty

[bcooney]

Are you familiar with subsummary reports?