So every day at work, we add up (using a calculator) all of the money spent on Fines, Prints and Faxes. This is generally a ton of small transactions … .20 or .60 cents, maybe a couple dollar transactions and a few larger ones (generally faxes).
And of course this has to be done twice (since the everything is doubled checked for accuracy by a second person). And if there’s an error… it might be four or more times that all of these transactions (which can easily be more than a dozen) have to be calculated.
Now once we’ve got all this information figured out, we have to put it into an excel spreadsheet. I figured, why not save a bunch of effort, and make a temporary worksheet, where you just list each transaction, and let excel add it up for you. This has the added advantages that the second check person doesn’t have to enter anything, just compare the number you entered to those on the sheet, and if there errors it’ll be much easier to spot them by comparing the paper copy to what’s on the screen than it would be to re-enter them all into the calculator.
So I (tried) to explain this to my semi-boss and she seemed rather put off that I was trying to change things… explaining that I shouldn’t be doing anything that would create more work. Thing is, I’ve already revised the form/through-put 2-3 times now, and each time has made dealing with the daily deposit easier, and less error-prone. I’m fairly confident that if I can make the form do what I want it to (which I can, I just need to figure out how), this also would make things easier, more efficient, and harder to make mistakes (or at least, easier to detect them).
Ugh. Sometimes I just don’t get people.
Regardless, I do wish I had one of these:
