A Nifty Report

The next button on the Coupon Central main menu is "Coupons Expiring This Week." This report is useful for those really good coupons I definitely want to use, but I'm waiting for a good sale. If no sales have come up, but I want to use the coupon before it expires, this menu helps me out if I check it. It's set up to spit out all coupons in the database whose expiration date is anytime, between "today" and a week from then. I actually haven't used it much, but it does come in handy at times.

Coupon Central, Part 2: Entering Coupons

In the last post in this series, I did little more than admit to the world that I have nerdish tendencies when it comes to organizing pieces of paper. I really hate paper for the most part. If it can be on a CD or a thumb drive or the Internet or the laptop's memory, that's where it belongs. My dream is to scan most of my kids' artwork and display it proudly as the wallpaper on the desktop. But I digress.

My distaste for paper doesn't stop when it comes to coupons, but what can you do? I've heard that some stores have this iPod, phone, store membership card, download, coupon thing that is totally electronic. I haven't looked into it. I don't have an iPod or whatever you need, and my phone doesn't connect to the Internet, so I'll stick with paper until I get the concept more. At any rate, pulling out the paper and handing it over still works when it comes to cash and the glossy paper money that comes in the Sunday edition.

BUT, that doesn't mean I'm thrilled with shuffling through wads of paper to find what I need. I do it, but I try to minimize it. So I enter them in my database. Here's the form I use to enter them:

I really do take the whole stack I just clipped and type the relevant information into the laptop before filing them in the accordion folder. I've gotten pretty fast at it. Now all the information I might want to search later is in a table somewhere, and I can bring it up and find what I need. But that's for a later post.

I am a nerd.

No, no. I really am. Ready?

I have all my coupons organized in an Access database. There. I've said it.

See, I had the wonderful experience of working in an office for the first three years after I got married. I learned tons of stuff about all kinds of things. One of those things was navigating my way through Access. Now, I wouldn't market myself as being able to build databases, but I do know how to use the little "Help Paper Clip," and I came up with a coupon database.

I'm still not sure whether it saves a ton of time, but I believe it helps me get deals I would have otherwise missed. Here's what I can do with my database (since I've set it up to spit out alphabetized reports):

I sit at the computer and look at on-line ads for drugstores (CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid). When I see a deal I'm interested in, I can just click over to Coupon Central and see if I can make it a better deal. No shuffling, flipping, or searching. I'll give more details as I go along, but I thought I'd share my confession of nerdhood so we can get that out of the way. Here's what my main menu looks like:

Pretty nifty, huh?