[warioba]

I am trying to create a student
management system and I am new to the access due to the chaos in managing
student informations and at the moment the college is lack of cash we can
not afford to hire external company or person to do it.
I have attempted to create a database to minimise problems but it is
difficult I have to admit it.

scenario
--------
The college register students and we are storing informations manual, our
students can not afford to pay fees at once, so they divide fees in yearly,
then to semester, (installment payments) I want to design a database which
will capture student details and process payments, later I want to add
course management.
current I am stuck in
1. How do I create a payment table or a form which the student is allowed to
pay annual tuition fees and other fees in installment and at the same time
the old balance is captured and the difference is then brought to to be
deducted again when student make a new payments?
I have tried to have
tblstudentInformation - which stores student informations,
tblpaymenttype - which stores type of payments e.g. fees,student
membership fees etc,
tblpayment - which is a transaction table for payments

I have then created a query tblpayment query which does the old payment -
amount deposited = new balance

I do not know if this is how it should be done please correct me
also when student pays in installment and the balance is overwritten and
that is where I am not sure what to do could anyone help please,
I make a confess I am stuck and my knowledge is finish any hand assistance
will be highly appreciated

[ScottGem]

As a general rule we do not store calculated values and the balance is a calculation. Generally college fees are billed per semester. So you would need to create a table that recorded the amount due for the semester. Your payment transaction table records each payment and links the payment back to the semester. To calculate the balance you add the payments and subtract them from the total due.

You can test the balances and if its negative, display a message indicating a refund. The refund is then processed as a transaction with a negative amount.

P.S. I'm not convinced that you are doing this for your college. I find it hard to imagine any college that does not already use software for such a task. So I strongly suspect this is a homework question. But I'm answering it because you appear to have done some of the work and are asking a specific question which fits into our guidelines about asking homework questions.

[warioba]

Thanks for the answer above, I write from Africa, try to do a research and you will be surprise most colleges use excel as a database. Just to clear the doubt this is a college database that I am working due to the financial Limitations, as we have student who carry forward their balances how will this work in tblsemester - I have tblpayment and do I need which I am recording all the payments, I am lost with the last steps, could you elaborate more

[ScottGem]

You can use a group by query that groups all the transactions by student. You would need to convert payments to a negative number so it subtracts from the total.