Should I be using 1 table or Multiple tables?

[adibakale]

I work in the financial industry and have been tasked to create a database for the department I work in.

We will be importing certain financial transactions into this Access database which will store the following information:

Customer Name 1, Customer name 2, Adress, City, State, Transaction amount, Date, Merchant, City, Country, Merchant Code,

Since these will be financial transactions, there won't be a lot of duplicate data, but there will be some such as the customer information, Merchant Information, address for customers and merchants, etc.

I have one table which stores all this information at the moment. I am wondering whether it makes more sense to split this into multiple tables or keep it as one table which will eventually contain a lot of duplicate entries.

Any advice on this would be great, I am having difficulty figuring out if and how to do this correctly.

 

[mole999]

the recommendation is multiple tables, you get bloat keep repeating the same data, so names / addresses / contact details should stay together, and you use a unique reference for that group to align with your financials. you can mix your merchants and customers in that batch though i would create a field that indicates which type they are, look at the northwinds database, its done there

 

[Aladin Akyurek]

Care to post a small sample of transactions, say 10 records?

 

[adibakale]

The file is imported once a week to a temporary table then it appends to the master table. I am having trouble figuring out how to import it to multiple tables while keeping all the financial records correct.