Compiling And Sorting Transactions More Efficiently

[Semp]

I currently have a spreadsheet made in Calc that I use to keep track of transactions, but its time consuming to enter the data from various different sources, and I'm looking to simplify the process.

I keep the transactions all on one sheet, formatted from oldest to newest, with all the data from the transactions listed in each column (date, item, price, qty, etc.), and a few other sheets that use the data from the transaction sheet to calculate various weekly/monthly totals and averages, among other things.

I'm not manually entering all of the transactions one by one, as there are hundreds of them each week. I pull the transactions daily from several different sources in CSV format, format the CSV so that the columns match up with my sheet, and copy paste them in. Formating them before pasting is required as all the sources arrange the columns a little differently unfortunately (and none of them are arranged in a way I feel is most efficient).

What I'm imagining in my mind is an individual sheet for each different CSV source, that I can simply copy paste the transactions into, and then that data from the different sheets being compiled into the main transaction sheet automatically, however I'm not sure how I would do this.

Its important that it would keep them all in proper order by date and time the transaction took place, as this affects my financials. So if there were three transactions from source A at 10AM, 11AM, and 2PM, and one transaction from source B, at 1PM, the transactions would need to be formatted in the final sheet top to bottom as 10AM, 11AM, 1PM, 2PM.

I don't know if what I'm asking is better suited for Libre Office Base, or if I can have Calc do all of this for me.

Thanks for any help.

[RusselB]

While Calc has the ability to do this, from the sounds of things I'd strongly recommend you get this project over to a proper database before the project gets so big that you get overwhelmed.
That is what happened to me with my budget. Started off as a spreadsheet (using Quattro Pro 5.0 for DOS), and then updating/upgrading to more recent versions of spreadsheets, until finally I got it over to Base.
One of the biggest advantages, in my opinion, is the lack of limit regarding the number of entries that can be held and worked with for calculations with minimal effect on the timing of the calculations.
Eg: summing 20000 entries was taking seconds in Calc, as using Base it's done before I can start the stopwatch.

Please note that the learning curve for Base is a lot steeper than that of Calc, especially if you've not used a database previously.

[Semp]

Thanks for that Russel,

I figured I'd probably be better off looking into Base for this, as it will most likely continue to get more complex later on as well...

I'll start looking into Base tomorrow.

Thanks again.

[John_Ha]

The LO Base Handbook is an excellent place to start.