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Knowing how to track project expenses is an important aspect of business operations and management. SQL (Structured Query Language) is an excellent tool for this purpose because it provides capabilities for manipulating and retrieving data stored in databases, allowing us to analyze project expenses efficiently. In this blog post, we will guide you through the steps of building a Project Expense Tracking System using simple SQL queries.
1. Database Design
Let’s start by creating a database. We’ll name it “ProjectExpenses”. Within this database, we need to create two tables: “Projects” and “Expenses”. Our Projects table will contain fields for ProjectID, ProjectName, and Budget. Meanwhile, the Expenses table will store ExpenseID, ProjectID (which refers to the Project in the Projects table), ExpenseName, and ExpenseAmount.
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CREATE DATABASE ProjectExpenses; USE ProjectExpenses; CREATE TABLE Projects ( ProjectID INT PRIMARY KEY, ProjectName VARCHAR(100), Budget DECIMAL(10,2) ); CREATE TABLE Expenses ( ExpenseID INT PRIMARY KEY, ProjectID INT FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES Projects(ProjectID), ExpenseName VARCHAR(100), ExpenseAmount DECIMAL(10,2) ); |
2. Inserting Data
Now, let’s insert some dummy data into our tables for demonstration purposes.
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INSERT INTO Projects VALUES (1, 'Project X', 5000); INSERT INTO Projects VALUES (2, 'Project Y', 3000); INSERT INTO Expenses VALUES (1, 1, 'Expense A', 1000); INSERT INTO Expenses VALUES (2, 1, 'Expense B', 500); INSERT INTO Expenses VALUES (3, 2, 'Expense C', 1500); |
3. Tracking Project Expenses
With the data in place, we can now start tracking our project expenses. We fetch the necessary information from the database and calculate the total expenses for each project, as well as the remaining budget.
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SELECT P.ProjectName, P.Budget, SUM(E.ExpenseAmount) AS TotalExpenses, (P.Budget - SUM(E.ExpenseAmount)) AS RemainingBudget FROM Projects P JOIN Expenses E ON P.ProjectID = E.ProjectID GROUP BY P.ProjectName, P.Budget; |
This SQL query gives us all the information we need in a very efficient way. It also demonstrates how powerful SQL can be for managing and analyzing business data and expenses.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we’ve learned how to setup an SQL-based Project Expense Tracking system, and how to insert and retrieve data in order to monitor and manage project expenses and budget. Playing around with the SQL queries and trying different scenarios will provide more confidence and let you utilize SQL more in expense tracking and numerous other data analytics tasks.