I have a difficult problem, and I think it will require programming of
some sort. Or there may be a simple solution that I don't know about.I
have contacted a consultant about this, but my boss is not quite sold
on paying someone to do this for us. I don't have any kind of IT/
computer background, so I am working on this from manuals, online help
and what I learned in my SF administrator class. I know this may be a
little hard to understand, and would be more than happy to discuss
with you if that's easier, but here goes:

We use Salesforce to track donors.  We track the money given to us in
a payments custom tab, and track money in the pipeline in our proposal
tab (which is actually the Opportunities tab).  We are trying to get a
report we are currently maintaining in Excel to come out of
Salesforce.

I recently created a "Target" custom object tab. A Target is the
amount of money we want to get from a segment of our donors for the
fiscal year (examples of target names: Foundation FY08, Major Donor
FY). The monetary amounts would be entered in and locked at the
beginning of the fiscal year.  SO there are 3 object we need to relate
to Targets: projects (custom object), proposals (opportunities) and
the payments (custom object).  The payments received and expected
revenue from proposals will appear as related lists on the Target tab.
We will add all of those up to track our progress against each
Target.

We will use rollup sumamry fields to total and measure the payments
against the target amount. And hopefully, after Winter 08 is released,
we can do the same for the expected revenue of proposals.

Right now on our proposal page we have look ups to the target and the
associated project. The issue is that there could be multiple targets
and multiple projects for a single proposal with a single dollar
amount. We need to divvy up the proposal expected revenue to the
projects and/or targets. One idea we had is creating one parent
proposal for the total amount with multiple child proposals. But I
couldn't figure out how to do this.

Is this a many-to-many relationship problem? Or is it many-to-one?

Can anyone help me out a bit on this? I'm in over my head and keep
getting more confused. Thanks!
Noel