bridge application
Reaching the point of diminishing returns on a project
Over the past month, I have been working on a project to automate payroll entry for a client that has close to 300 employees and is growing. Naturally, it is the company’s best interest to get this payroll automated as much as possible. To do this I’ve been developing an application to bridge the payroll [...]
Knowing where to fix a problem pays off in quick response
I was on the phone with a Payroll Specialist about 30 minutes ago. One of the company’s biggest clients is a trucking company. We set them up back in January with a bridge application to facilitate payroll entry. The client emails their payroll in a spreadsheet with a consistent layout that I and my coworker [...]
Microsoft Great Plains – Integration Manager in action
The company uses a version of Microsoft Great Plains (GP) that’s been customized for the PEO industry. One piece of that is Integration Manager (IM). I’ve talked about the bridge application a number of times before. With an Excel file from a client and, with some sophisticated programming, we create a tab-delimited text transaction file [...]
Migrating Existing Access Applications to Access 2007
This post is one of the more esoteric ones where I delve into the geeky details of some of my programming work. I know – it’s really sexy, isn’t it? I have mentioned the bridge application I developed that helps make payrolls run faster, helping client employees get paid faster, and so forth, using Microsoft [...]
Handling errors in the payroll bridge application
Clients email the company their payroll files, and the columns on the payroll indicate Regular Hours, Overtime, Vacation, and so forth. To make the bridge application work, I and the other developer map the program that assigns payroll items based on this layout. It only works, however, when the layout is consistent. Whenever a client [...]
Rapid response to payroll layout change
One hour ago I got an e-mail from a payroll specialist, telling me that a client with 107 active employees had added a column to their payroll file and asking if I could fix their bridge application to allow for the new payroll item. I opened the code, and after I made the changes needed [...]
When the feature became a problem
When I was initially developing the bridge application a couple years ago, I had set up the Close button on several forms to be the Cancel button. That way a user can just hit the Esc button to close the form, if they prefer to use the keyboard. As the applications for various clients have [...]
Backing up the bridge applications and drive-independence
When I was developing the bridge applications, I had set the code up to recognize a “test” environment and a “production” environment through hard-coded filenames. It became cumbersome to change the filenames in code every time I moved the application to each environment. We also realized we needed to set up a “standalone” environment for [...]
Helping 525 employees get paid
As you may have read before, I’ve written the bridge applications that prepare clients’ payroll for a program we use to batch load into our payroll management system. Whenever I and now my coworker, whom I’m mentoring, finish one of these bridge applications, we update a master list of all the clients we’ve set up [...]
Revised payroll layout forces changes to bridge application
In an earlier post I described some changes to a client’s payroll journal. In this one I’ll share how I worked those changes into the corresponding bridge application we use to automate the payroll entry. You will recall that I made two significant changes: Added a new payroll item and Removed totals columns I will [...]
