Hello to all! I am going to make a stock management and Point of sale for a person on Ms Excel file. Actually my client has a store of bedding accessories (e.g pillows, blankets, quilts, cushions. bedsheets and many other items).I have to maintain such an excel file that should maintain stock as well as keep record of sales and profit. I have worked about 70 percent as per requirements of my client. The confusion which I am facing is about charges of my work.Please guide me how much money should I demand from my client.Will it suitable to demand for 50 to 80 dollars? I am so confused. I am also pasting 2 screen shots of my work. Please guide me.I shall be thank full to you. 
Saboor880 9 Junior Poster
rproffitt 2,662 "Nothing to see here." Moderator
The sad thing is that Excel is a poor man's database. You have no control over data entry and more.
The price for this is at best a lunch meal since it's just a bad design choice. Now if you had gone with some SQL database and a frontend with reports, now you are in the ballpark of a real app.
AssertNull 1,094 Practically a Posting Shark
If you know what you're doing (which I don't), you can integrate MS Excel with MS Access and MS SQL Server, Visual Studio, etc. etc. and get the best of both worlds (spreadsheet that connects to databases). Again, I don't know how to do that, but I've seen folks that do and they've made some really interesting apps.
I've also seen spreadsheets with macros accomplish stuff that sure seemed like it needed a database, but actually turned out that it didn't. Excel can do some pretty amazing stuff in the right hands (again, the right hands are not MY hands). YMMV and it depends on the project.
That said, those screenshots look pretty odd for a spreadsheet. What if there are 5000 transactions? Will there be 5000+ columns? You may be able to use a spreasdsheet for transactions, but it's a good bet that if you're adding columns for every transaction rather than rows, there is a design flaw somewhere.
I have worked about 70 percent as per requirements of my client. The confusion which I am facing is about charges of my work.
You did 70 percent of the work before negotiating a fee with the client?
Please guide me how much money should I demand from my client.Will it suitable to demand for 50 to 80 dollars?
50 to 80 dollars? Is this your profession?
If so, a major part of this professsion is having a good idea of what you can provide, how much time it will take you, and a corresponding fee largely based on that. No one on an online forum where no one knows your skill level, your location, your business model, your overhead, your competitors' rates, the exact project specifications, etc., etc. can guide you on a fee on anything but the most ballpark estimate of between ten dollars and ten thousand dollars (not exaggerating. How on Earth could we know? Too many factors).
Based on the screenshots though, if you're going in to negotiate a fee, you need to clean up the program before showing it to the client, even with the "It's not done yet" caveat. You need to capitalize and add some formatting like dollar signs and decimal points where they belong, and have numbers on the screenshots that make sense. It takes hardly any time at all and you want to make a good impression. It's like having an auto dealership having a dirty car on the lot. If I'm the client and the guy I'm paying is sloppy in what I can SEE, I am going to assume that what I CAN'T see (ie the calculation code) is even worse, which doesn't put me in the mood to pay very much, if anything, for the product.
rproffitt commented: A reply that excels. +11
Taywin 312 Posting Virtuoso
Just a quick suggestion to you if you really want to use Excel as your database (and also input & report).
- You should create a sheet containing all items and their extra/meta info instead of have them all in a column inside transaction sheet. This sheet would become your reference (database) sheet to used/referenced by other sheets later on. (Think of "table of content" of a book)
- Once you have a reference sheet, you can now have transaction sheets for each item (in vertical fashion) while referring all your meta data from the reference page, so that you don't overrun the whole sheet with transaction in horizontal fashion. Furthermore, you can even add more information for each transaction and it should still be fit to a portrait orientation print out age.
- You could have a summary page by referencing to all of each item transaction later on your client wants to have a report.
Those are just suggestions to refine your current Excel design even though I do not recommend using Excel for the job (but the request may be from your client).
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