Rebuilding a Locked Access Quoting Database in Power Apps for a Promotional Products Supplier
Every quote, order, freight calculation and factory instruction ran through a Microsoft Access front end built years earlier. It still worked. The problem was that it could not be changed. The front end had only ever been handed over compiled and the developer who built it was no longer contactable. We rebuilt it as a Power Apps canvas app on the same SharePoint data, without moving a single record.
Discuss your Access replacement project →The challenge: a system nobody could change
The Access front end handled everything. Quotes, quantity break pricing, air and sea freight, tax thresholds, margins, supplier instructions and the monthly margin report. Two decades of trading logic sat inside it. When the business needed that logic changed, nothing could be done. The front end had only ever been handed over compiled and the developer who built it was no longer contactable.
What we built
A Power Apps canvas app built directly on the SharePoint lists the old system already used. Same data, same numbers, rebuilt so it can be changed. Every calculation was reverse engineered from the working system and tested against real historical quotes before anything went live.
| Break | Qty | Supplier US$ | Freight | Chargeable | Transport | Buy / u | Margin | Sell / u | Sell total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 250 | 3.82 | Air +Tax | 46.2 kg | $637.56 | $9.22 | 35% | $14.19 | $3,547 |
| B | 500 | 3.45 | Air +Tax | 77.0 kg | $962.50 | $7.80 | 35% | $12.00 | $6,000 |
| C | 1,000 | 3.10 | Sea +Tax | 0.77 CBM | $1,000.00 | $6.18 | 35% | $9.50 | $9,504 |
How it works
A quote is raised against a distributor and the delivery address pre-fills from that record. Items are added from a catalogue of 647 products and choosing a style auto-fills the packaging dimensions, weight and quantity per pack. Each item carries its own supplier, artwork dates and tracking, so one order can span several factories.
Quantity breaks price themselves. Supplier cost converts from US dollars, freight is worked out for both air and sea, import tax applies past the threshold and margin is added last. Quote, order and factory PDFs generate on demand and the order status works itself out from the dates already on each line, so nobody has to maintain a status field.
Project snapshot
Delegation and performance
The pricing list holds more than 75,000 rows and the line item list more than 25,000, both well past the point where SharePoint stops filtering server side. Left alone, the app would have silently returned the first 500 rows and quietly given wrong answers. Columns were indexed on the lookup fields so every query the app runs stays delegable and views were scoped to keep result sets small as the data grows.
Technologies
Related services
We built this with our Power Apps, legacy modernisation and SharePoint services.
View all services →The results: the same numbers, in a system that can change
The app runs quoting and orders day to day, on the same SharePoint data it always used.
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