Structuring Databases for Financial Statements

Question

I am looking for the best way to structure my database. I have quarterly financial statements for 1000’s of companies from 1997-2012. Each company has three different state

Answer 1

My advice to you is to think about not using a SQL database to do this. Instead, think of using something like SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS). If you want to get a quick start with SSAS, I recommend getting up to speed on PowerPivot for Excel. You can take the model you develop in PowerPivot and import it into SSAS when you're ready.

Why don't I recommend SQL? Because you're going to have a problem aggregating accounts in SQL Server. For example, your balance sheets aren't going to be something you're going to be able to aggregate easily in SQL -- Asking SQL Server for the "Cash" for 2010, for example means that you want to get the entry for the end of December 2010, not that you want to SUM all of the entries for Cash for that year (which would be a nonsense number). On the other hand, with income and expense accounts such as those which would appear on your income statements, you would want to SUM those values up. To make matters worse, some reports are going to have a mix of account types on them, which is going to make reporting quite difficult.

SSAS has provisions inside the product where it "knows" how to aggregate for your reports based on account type, and there are many tutorials out there which can show you how to set this up.

Either way, you're going to need to store your data somewhere before it goes into your reporting system or Analysis Services cube. In order to do that, you should structure your data something like this. Let's say you're storing your data in a table called Reports:

Reports
--------
[Effective Date]
[CompanyID]
[AccountID]
[Amount]

Your Account table would have the description of what you're trying to store (income, expenses, etc). Your [Effective Date] column would link back into a Dates table which describes to which year, quarter, etc., your data belongs. In essence, what I'm describing is a classic shape for reporting databases, called a star schema.