Can queries be used in this situation?
 

A 'point in time' extract of a database is taken at the end of each month in
order to report on the prior months activities.

A new variance report is now required to compare each completed months
financials against the financials from the month before.

However, new records may have been generated in the past month or records
may have been deleted.

For example, November may have had 400 records and December might have 450
records (60 new records, 10 deleted records and therefore 390 records match).
A variance report would be generated for the 390 matched records and an
exception report would be generated for the 70 non matching records.

Typically vlookups would just be used to compared old to new and vice versa
to identify new/deleted lines and then run variances on all matched records.


This is very time consuming to do each month. Is there a way queries can
work with the 2 files to automate this a little better (I'm not very familiar
with queries)? Or perhaps some other recommendation?

Thanks