Have you considered training a couple of staff on MS Access? If you have this software as part of the MS Office package, then this way you can get the bespoke database you need and ongoing support costs are minimised, meaning a one-off cost to train individuals may be cheaper. Just a thought.

I would agree to using MS Access for this purpose, i have used it for years with over 12,000 entries, you just need to set it up to enable queries, etc. It's the main downfall of developing any data-base, what do you want it to do? How are you going to retrieve the data? Start with those first...

Good Morning, Previously I have been responsible for documentation control under my managerial remit and have used both Access and Excel. Access was for a company working trackside for Network Rail, 100 employees, the system was audited annually by Achilles as part of the Link-up process. The persons who maintained the system were the receptionists, they were sent on an in-house course with our IT expert and were exceedingly good at keeping everything as it should be. The system was designed to flag up 90, 60 and 30 day warnings of training requirements for individuals and we never had any problems. Excel was used at my last company where the training department maintained the system for 400+ employees. It was a simple system which recorded the competence of each individual with dates. Our IT department were working on a flag up system. I kept back up hard copies of all certificates and competences. In my opinion either is workable and it really depends on what resources you have available to make the system do what you want it to do and which system your maintainer (you possibly) are most comfortable with. Take Care.

Hello All, thanks for all your responses. A couple of facts about our training situation: Records out of date, Spreadsheet has been split up, staff don't understand Excel enough for pivot tables although I have introduced conditional formatting, system is cumbersome now. We have considered Access as an alternative but we would need someone who understood MS Access to a high level and all aspects of relational databases. We require the training officer to simply input records and retrieve data and reports and not have any design and re-design responsibilities. There is an IT department (based elsewhere) who are severely stretched, they can install software (alongside keeping various systems going) but thats all they have time to do. I was looking for an off the shelf training database that is already designed, tried and proven. It would have to do the current tasks but more efficiently and prompt the training officer when training was due (preferably not on the day). I am sure there is software, which can be purchased, which is the best option rather than having to design things that may or may not work and have to qualify people to a higher standard than necessary. Again thanks