I have an old application that I would like to redesign. The reason I would like to redesign it is because one of the principle tables was poorly thought out.It is a project budgeting application containing multiyear budget entries for a multitude of projects. The parent table contains basic project info including description, project manager, location, etc. The budget or financial table is a child table that connects on a one to one relationship. The there are 10 fields in this child table for each year of the budget forecast. Within these 10 fields there is the opportunity for 5 budget amounts and corresponding fund sources. I'm sure you can see the limitatins with this arrangement very quickly. Since there is a limit on the number of fields in a table, the number of years that can be forecasted is also limited. Also, what if the project requires more than 5 fundsources in any given year? I'm stuck there too. (I might mention here that I inherited the table design.)

I think a better approach here would be for the child table to be a one to many relationship with a structure like this:
ProjectID
Amount
Source
Year
This would allow an unlimited number of years and an unlimited number of sources per year. Another option would be to separate tables for each year and keep them on a one to one relationship. Each table could have an expanded number of fields to provide for more fundsources in the year. This idea doesn't follow the normalization rules very well and seems poor to me. Although I could probably make it work.

My problem is in the display of the data. My mainform presents a page whereupon we show ten years worth of the budget forecast. A spinner allows the user to move the "window" forward and backward in time if the extents of the forecast exceed what can be shown at one time. Each year of the forecast is presented discretely in a group of textboxes tied to the fields in the table. My users really like this presentation because it makes it easy to see how the funding progresses from year to year. If I choose the first option for redesign of the child table, the only presentation I can think of is in a series of 10 little grids. The number of records in each would vary depending on how many budget items were existant for the year. This messes up the "clean" display and the scroll bars consume space I don't have to give.

So I'm asking for any thoughts, comments, or suggestions.
Thanks