CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

My Organisation wants to, in the next year or so, purchase CiviCRM to manage its contacts process. However, we are urgently in need of a contacts database and as we cannot afford Civi for the time being, we are about to design a Ms ACCESS database to serve us in the interim. Does anybody have any advice as to how best to design the ACCESS databae to ensure that it is as simple as possible to switch to CiviCRM when the time comes?

    Perhaps you have already done this, but I would advise that you re-visit your decision and carefully weigh the pros and cons of each option. Depending on your knowledge of MS Access and, of course, on what you need from this database, it can take a lot of time to design and implement an Access database. CiviCRM, on the other hand, is ready to go right out of the box. So you can either spend the time designing and implementing an Access database or, you can spend the time figuring out how to get CiviCRM going. The latter may take more time now, but then you won't have to spend time later on a conversion project.
   Having said that, if you decide to go with Access, you want to make sure that you design a "relational" database. This will make it much easier for you to get the data from Access to CiviCRM.

Good luck,
Cynthia