A few weeks ago I mentioned a project I’m working on to streamline the benefits auditing reports. This process involves verifying premium payments for health insurance with what is taken out of employees’ paychecks. As I mentioned in the previous post (via the Twitter photo, no doubt), the application I’m working on will save 2-3 weeks’ worth of work and many trees’ lives.

I just met with the HR department to discuss the status, and the HR Specialist who does this work mentioned that the current process wastes a lot of time. But needed by the business, I said.

“It’s a necessary evil,” the HR Manager replied.

“Well, hopefully we can make it for something good,” I said.

Programming for Good to Reduce Necessary Evil. That’s what I’m about.

I can tell I’ve become branded as the “go-to” guy for certain types of projects. Last week the HR manager came to me and said that she didn’t know who else to talk with about a benefits audit the company is doing for one of its clients.

The company and the client are trying to resolve a $20,000 discrepancy that appears to have arisen from November 2003 through November 2006, when the client stopped using the company’s health and dental plan. Oh, and since this all needed to be finalized by the end of this month, which was about two weeks away, she needed whatever I could do in a day or so.

The HR manager sent me an email that contained about six Excel workbooks. Each workbook contained several worksheets. These worksheets were benefit summaries for each payroll that had been run during that three-year period, from the client’s perspective.

The company needed to compare this information with what existed in the system, but the HR manager recognized that it was very cumbersome to go through the information in its existing format.

With the task at hand, I imported each worksheet into an Access database and compiled the information into a single table that I exported and sent back to the HR manager.

It sounds like I’m making it simpler than it was at the time. I had to write a couple of Excel macros to get the data in the proper format for importing into Access. That and a VBA function to import each worksheet from each workbook did the trick, for the most part.