Sample Accounting Databases

To give you practice with learning how to identify the key tables within an accounting database, I’m going to use three different databases as examples. The first database is the sample installed with Crystal Reports XI R2. The other two databases come from software packages in use by businesses today. We’ll be working with data from the Microsoft Small Business Financials package and Quickbooks Professional software. This gives you ‘real world’ experience by working with databases used with actual accounting systems. Of course, your own reports will probably be using a different accounting system, but this should give you enough practice that you can apply these guidelines to your own database.

The next sections discuss the databases we’ll be working with and look at their relevancy to what we are doing. Additionally, each description is accompanied with a figure showing you a snapshot of all the tables in the database. This gives you an idea of how accounting tables are named and it lets you refer back to each figure throughout this appendix for reference.