Hello Catwoman1264,
The question you were offered for your essay seems rather ambiguous,
so I will post my research in the comment section. However if you find
it deserves the answer spot, just let me know.
A company could store finance data like the following:
- Income
- Project budget
- Tax status
- Health insurance
- Travel expenses
- ...
The database system used to store this data could be:
- MSSQL
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- Oracle
- MS Access
- ...
Or non-traditional "databases":
- File system
- MS Excel
- XML
- ...
Here are some online databases connected to finances:
Budget of the United States Government - Fiscal Year 2003 - Public
Budget Database
http://w3.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/fy2003/db.html
Budget Database - Complete personal finance type-in software (1986)
http://www.atarimagazines.com/v5n7/BudgetdB.html
Community College Statistical and Budget Database
http://www.ccleague.org/leginfo/budget/database/
Budget & Financial Reporting - Automated Budget Database User's Guide
(The University of Texas Houston Health Science Center)
http://is.hsc.uth.tmc.edu/training/bpps/autobud/autobud.html
FindCash.Com - Unclaimed Money Database
http://www.findcash.com/
European State Finance Database
http://www.le.ac.uk/hi/bon/ESFDB/louis.html
Database on Central Government Finances
http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/BibEc/data/Articles/dseindecrv:32:y:1997:i:1:p:89-105.html
ZIPsales Lookup Sales Tax Look-Up & Calculation System
http://tax.cchgroup.com/taxPreparation/salesTax/generalSales/ZIPsalesLookup/
Commercial Bank and Bank Holding Company Database
http://www.chicagofed.org/economicresearchanddata/data/bhcdatabase/index.cfm
If you need to write the essay, maybe it helps if you visualize
everything a company would need to know in order to manage their
finances. Go through every step in detail, because everything
connected to a certain step could be stored in a database. You could
switch from a narrative of somebody working there; tell what's she
doing; and with every step, have a small interlude that would show
what would happen in the database, how it would be stored here, how
this transaction would be handled electronically, and so on. Also, you
could suggest ways for a small company that's still largely run by
"paper data" to move to finance software.
And you might compare history and historical software; for example,
important historical releases like VisiCalc -- which some call the
first "spreadsheet" application -- could be of interest:
VisiCalc History
http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm
"The idea for the electronic spreadsheet came to me while I was a
student at the Harvard Business School, working on my MBA degree, in
the spring of 1978. Sitting in Aldrich Hall, room 108, I would
daydream. "Imagine if my calculator had a ball in its back, like a
mouse..." (I had seen a mouse previously, I think in a demonstration
at a conference by Doug Engelbart, and maybe the Alto). And "..imagine
if I had a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could
see the virtual image hanging in the air in front of me. I could just
move my mouse/keyboard calculator around, punch in a few numbers,
circle them to get a sum, do some calculations, and answer '10% will
be fine!'" (10% was always the answer in those days when we couldn't
do very complicated calculations...)"
-- Daniel Bricklin
Hope it helps!
Search terms:
databases overview managing finances
budget database
money database
finances database
insurance company database
controlling taxes database
ZIPsales
apple history spreadsheet
visicalc |
