Line Item Budgeting

I'm in the middle of writting a new program for maintaining line-item budgets. Following is a screen shot, showing the tab used for setting up and maintaining fiscal years:

http://www.radile.com/rdweb/temp/bud100.html

A little later, I'd like to get some feedback on the other two tabs (Detail and Capital), which will be used for maintaining Revenue/Expense/Capital plans. But to begin, I suspect that there may be some controversy over how to handle fiscal year data.

I'm designing a new database along with new applications. At this point I've accumulated 80-90 new tables and none of them contain multiple members. But there's some appeal to storing annual budget data in separate members.

For example, it would be very easy to call a CL program from this application to add, copy, and delete physical file members for each fiscal year added, copied, or deleted.

The copy function is quite appealing. Some folks write separate programs and separate menu items to build next year's budget from a prior year's budget. It would be rather tempting to just use the CPYF command to duplicate a member, rather than writing an RPG program to do that.

SQL performance would be enhanced by dividing the table into members. Back-up and restore procedures would run quicker by simply backing up the *last member.

There are a few incorrigible members on this list who seem to be bent on moving all their IBM i data to MS SQL Server, and replacing all their RPG programs with VB or C#. I'd expect them to object to multi-members. But it kind-of appeals to me to take advantage of multi-members in this case. Most of my new applications are written in RPG.

I'd appreciate your feedback.

Thanks,

Nathan.