Access Accounting - Blog

Microsoft Office Word 2007 (BETA)

I am going to go over some of the features that I have found most useful in Word 2007.  I thought to help with this I would write this piece using Word 2007 BETA, and so far so good.

It took me a while to find where the 'About' option had gone to, finding that I needed to add it to my toolbar, so the location of some functions aren’t completely obvious.

I have had no formal training on the new Office 2007 product, so I am just learning it as I go.  This is something which I suspect most users will probably do.

I like the overall look and feel of the application, but this is going to take a bit of getting used to!    The ribbons are however, clear and well laid out.

For those of you that have read my post on ‘Microsoft Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System’, you will know that Microsoft say users will take on average 2 days to 2 weeks to get used to the new way of working with this software.  Once you have got a handle on it in one application, however, the knowledge will port to the rest of the Office suite - as with previous versions.

Investing in People

People are the lifeblood of any company. A cliché perhaps, but I can’t help being a great believer in the importance of investing in staff whether this is through training, self-development or enhancing their current role to make it more rewarding. Quite simply, we’ve found this approach to add great value to the company.

This whole philosophy is part of our ‘always recruiting’ culture where we’re constantly on the lookout for talented individuals with spark, passion, creativity and vision – even if no role currently exists for them. There’s no denying that this approach does take time and effort. What’s more the whole process doesn’t stop there, as you’ve also got to constantly “sell” the idea of a career to all staff. The process is therefore ongoing, requiring commitment from us as directors to encourage people who want to develop their career - and inspire them with the possibilities that are open to them. 

However, we’ve found this to be time well spent, having a positive impact on staff retention - which can only be good for us as a company!

It would be interesting to hear from other businesses that have also tried this approach or indeed have other approaches to HR that they would like to share.

John Beech

Preparation for CIS Scheme

In April 2007 the Government introduces a new scheme to manage the tax liability of sub-contractors involved in the construction industry.  The new scheme replaces old manual vouchers,  grubby certificates, and annual returns.  The scheme simplifies the variety of ways in which a sub-contractor might be categorised.  It will allow contractors to verify the identity and tax status of subbies on-line and will require that companies make monthly returns, with on-line submission being the preferred route.  However, as with all new systems the transitionary period might be painful.  Companies will need to ensure that the data that they hold on their sub-contractors matches exactly the data held by HMRC.  A mis-match in a sub-contractors name will result in the whole return being rejected.  HMRC will be providing companies with either listings or CDs containing the data identities of sub-contractors that the company has employed within the last 2 years.  For larger companies it will be a task of some magnitude, to match this HMRC data against their own records.  The Access CIS software will contain tools to assist with this matching process. For those companies that have traded with less than 125 subcontractor records then they will only receive a paper listing from HMRC.  In these cases a manual reconciliation process will be required.  It is obvious that companies need to plan well in advance to ensure that their data will be "cleaned" and prepared for the new scheme.

Kevin Misselbrook         

Data Fragmentation in SQL Server 2000

Although SQL Server is a database management system, it will not do everything for you automatically. In many cases, even the most basic administration tasks are neglected by the average user & can result in a decrease in performance. For the purposes of this article we will take a beginners look into maintaining indexes on SQL Server 2000.

To start with, you have the ability to produce a fragmentation report for the data and indexes of the specified table with in SQL Server. Run DBCC SHOWCONTIG using SQL Query Analyser. This command returns a report for either the entire database or for specified tables. It is especially useful to run this if your database has suffered a gradual decrease in performance over periods of time. A gradual decrease will indicate index fragmentation. By scanning through this report you will be able to determine the primary tables that have been affected. Two important areas of this report to look at are:

1. Extents scanned & Extent Switches – in an ideal world you should have one less switch than extents

2. Extent scan fragmentation levels

Once you have diagnosed to problem tables/indexes, you can run DBCC DBREINDEX. This command rebuilds one or more indexes for a single table. Generally, your best bet is to rebuild all indexes on a given table or rebuild the primary index (rebuilding the primary one will automatically rebuild all others). This command can only be run on a table by table basis – i.e. it can not be run on the entire database. In addition to this, the DBCC DBREINDEX command should be run as an offline operation i.e. single user mode. The following example rebuilds all indexes on the PRODUCTS table using the default fillfactor they were originally created with:

DBCC DBREINDEX (PRODUCTS, '', 0)

For more in-depth information about these DBCC commands, including parameter options, please refer to resources such as SQL Books Online.

Oliver Cox