Hi Terry,

Some of your points simply are not valid:

When I buy something online or by using a check or credit card, the
correct data has to go into the correct space provided by the issuer
of the form (cells in a spreadsheet, etc.). If you think not then
try putting your zip code into the amount space for everything that
you buy... The person or organization at the common point or with the
most situational clout has the initiative: Payers of bills in the
case under consideration; "The Golden Rule; He Who Has the Gold
Rules".

In this case that can well translate into a polite notice that "This
is notice that as of 'pick a date' bills submitted for payment to XYZ
must be entered into a copy of the attached Excel template, which will
be attached to an email from you. After 'pick a date' bills submitted
in any other format will be addressed only after all conforming bills
have been addressed. They will then be paid only after a conversation
with whomever submits the bills for your organization.

We appreciate your cooperation in helping us to control the costs of
doing business by eliminating an unnecessary translation stage in our
facilities.

Thank you.....

Notice that the vendors don't have to agree. They have only to do
what they will. Consequences are already spelled out.

Try the above on your local phone company or other utility provider
and you won't have much success.

If you are a builder and deal with lots of small vendors you'll have
success without complaint. There aren't very many vendors today who
haven't got a PC, email and Excel.

---------------
We are *not* talking .Net here! We are talking Access here. .Net is
down the corridor to your left.... .Net takes in a whole 'nother
universe of things that intersects here only slightly. There are
separate newsgroups for .Net.

---------------------
Laissez faire is a neat ideal. Supposedly, the US economy is operated
as "Laissez Faire Capitalism". However, it becomes ever more
regulated as real and imagined abuses are discovered and politicized.
Laissez faire really works well for independent and solo vacations.
Ahhh!, unstructured time and activities. However, in business,
wherever two or more entities (internal or external) meet, there have
to be rules and the adherence thereto for effective and efficient
exchange of information. In the existing case, it was the lack of
existing rules that caused Original Poster and his organization time
and money.

It will require some time and money to improve the situation to the
point that the stable amount being expended over time to achieve the
same (or better) result is attained.

HTH
--
-Larry-
--

"Terry Bourne" wrote in message
...
I suugest the last thing you should do is try to get each company to
change
the way in which it submits its data to you. I assume no
standardised way
was specified when initial contracts were drawn up. To get all to
agree and
follow a standard set by you would probably cause havoc and
confusion -
besides which each company may have a valid internal reason for
producing
its accounting data in its' own chosen way.

Since we are talking .Net here, it would surely be easier and
potentially
less error prone to write a program using the office inter-op
libraries, to
convert each company submission to a standard format Access, Excel
or
whatever.

One of the great benefits of .Net is that in all areas from chosen
development language to data entry/storage you can allow people to
do things
their own way! My experience has been to always let people do things
the way
they want, unless there is a very valid reason for not doing so.

Regards
Terry



"mttmwsn" wrote in message
...
I'm fairly new to MS products and I need some NG help.

I'm doing a big construction project and I have serveral companies
sending
me billing data in excell format. I want to create a summary of
my
spending
to see if it matches up with my budget.

What I want to do is to centralize the accounting data in access.
My
problems is that each company has a different way of formating
their data
in
excell.

I thought that maybe I can create a form in access to allow each
accountant
to input their data directly, but if they screw up, then I have
bad data
in
my database %P

Ideas?