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Database software

J

jamesthemidwife

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 21, 2009
7
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Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Hi there,

Firstly, sorry if this question has been asked a million times before, I did do a search promise!

I'm in the middle of a PhD, and am looking for a database programme to manage a large scale audit; I would like the programme to be able to have editable input fields, and to run queries based on the input data.
I assume bento and FileMaker can do this, but all of the reviews talk about contact management or calendar inputs, so am unsure.
I don't need anything too complex, just a little number crunching, although if I can export to numbers/excel/SPSS then that'll work too.
Ideally, I would like to input via the iPad once the database is set up, although this isn't essential.

Any of you experts have any suggestions??

Cheers, James
 
jamesthemidwife said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Hi there,

Firstly, sorry if this question has been asked a million times before, I did do a search promise!

I'm in the middle of a PhD, and am looking for a database programme to manage a large scale audit; I would like the programme to be able to have editable input fields, and to run queries based on the input data.
I assume bento and FileMaker can do this, but all of the reviews talk about contact management or calendar inputs, so am unsure.
I don't need anything too complex, just a little number crunching, although if I can export to numbers/excel/SPSS then that'll work too.
Ideally, I would like to input via the iPad once the database is set up, although this isn't essential.

Any of you experts have any suggestions??

Cheers, James
Click to expand...
You may use Pages to write business letters. However, this does not make is a dedicated business letter composition application. It is a general word processing application. In the same sense, Bento can be used to maintain contacts. This, however, does not make Bento a dedicated contact manager. Bento is a small general database manager for personal use. It includes templates for contacts, media inventory, and such like. If it does not include a template to handle your application, then design your own.

FileMaker is the parent application of Bento. FileMaker is an enterprise-level relational database management system. It is the most popular DBMS for Mac users. It is the second most popular DBMS for Windows users.

Having said that, I am troubled by the fact that you are preparing for an audit and are casting about for software to do the job. You mentioned SPSS. SPSS was the abbreviation for Statistical Program for Social Scientists. It has expanded its user base beyond social scientists, but it is still a statistical analysis environment. I would think that SPSS would not be a good choice for an audit.

My firm is subject to a variety of regular audits. Of one auditing accounting firm, a staff person in our finance division said: "They use Excel." She did not mean that in a good way. In her world, Excel was not reliable enough to be considered a professional auditing tool.

What I am getting at is this--audits are serious business. If your role is essential to the success of your audit, then your tools should be in place for the period covered by the audit. Your records should be traceable. Rather than casting about for software that you will use for the audit somehow, you should confer with the people responsible for the audit for their knowledge of what your role is in the audit and which tools will be required of you to ensure an unqualified opinion.
 
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