MS Access database creation

Easily can become a larger job than the first spec, however....

At present i have a VERY large Excel spreadsheet of some 43 pages, which has grown over many years. The spreadsheet answers various requirements.

The spreadsheet basically is the home to all of my companies supply prices. This in turns creates export pages to program our EPOS and easily allows me to set price levels on a GP basis of the same items to be sold. All ofthe functions are i beleive very simple and Excel has handled fine up to know. Purely the size is meaning that performance is becoming poor! So...

The first job is to take prices of similar products from (at the minute 8, but likely to increase) suppliers. It will then output the cheapest supplier by producing one page of items for management to order from.

The second job is to assign prices against each unit. There are 8 different price levels that need programming.

We then need to output various sheets, carrying this info, in order to allow me to import these prices into our EPOS system (if we can do this through ODBC or similar going forward it would be VERY good)

A couple of advancements that i would like is for the database to work out secondary suppliers, if the firstly supplier is out of stock and as the company is growing into other areas of the UK, some local suppliers cannot delivery over 50 miles radius. I would also like it to display any offers on products as on a regular basis throughout the year suppliers will offer stock promotion, like buy 8 get 1 free. At present we ignore this and simply deal with the cheapest product.

I have basic layout that i think will work well and not take much time for a database professional to pull out from Excel. However i would like this to grow into a business solution and potentially save us money, therefore further development is also anticipated. Perhaps through integration with our epos and stock control system so that it also produces a recommended order each week...? To this end i anticipate that the first price will become higher on a discussion about what can be achieved.