Back to Work

Well, the holidays are over. Everyone is back to work, and back to school. Spelling lists, math homework, and piano lessons are back on again.

It turns out that some of the people at work have been having a little harder time getting back into the swing of things. Yesterday, we ran our first payroll processing of the new year. We have administrative assistants at in each of the city departments enter the time card data. (I am the programmer, and designer of the payroll system). One of the administrative assistants forgot to enter about 2/3 of the time cards in her department. We ran the payroll update, and noticed that some of the reports were showing smaller amounts than usual. Then G.F., in the finance department (who does the same job in our city as Jeannette does in her city) gave me a call and mentioned that two people’s deductions were missing from a report where they usually appear. As it turned out, they hadn’t been paid at all. GF then looked at some other reports, and discovered that there were 42 time cards missing! For those 42 people, that would have been no way to ring in the New Year.

We pay employees by direct deposit. We had already sent the direct deposit data to the bank before making the discovery of the missing time cards. GF quickly called the bank and put the data on hold. Then I went about restoring the payroll system back to the state it was just prior to the update. (Good thing we back the payroll system up before running the final update!) I jumped through a few hoops, and performed some programming gymnastics, and was able to import the missing time card data into the system. We were then able to re-run the payroll update, with everyone getting paid (694 Employees in all), and the correct direct deposit information sent to the bank. -- And all was well in the City (and the employees' bank accounts!) once more.