jim, i agree with mr. booth. sometimes it's appropriate to do this because of speed. in my current project i had to do the same thing add i also added a recalculation button. if you apply table buffering using transaction processing then you shouldn't have any problems with updating the ytd field. but then again there are those certain cases so a recalculation button is appropriate. you might give the user a range to recalculate and not just update all ytds. good luck.