New bridge applications for trucking companies to significantly reduce payroll processing time

Whew! It's been a busy day. I spent some of my morning interviewing payroll specialists about potential client candidates for a bridge application. Over the next month or so, we'll be adding several new clients, so anything the IT group can do to better facilitate payroll entry has been greatly appreciated.

Some clients use the web-based system to enter their payroll, which automagically shows up in the system. Other clients, however, fax a timesheet, either handwritten or otherwise. We may want to look at some way to use OCR for some of these payrolls.

But there were a few good candidates, and I'll be working on the bridge applications for them in the next week.

Most of my day today has spent diagnosing the application my coworker and I were developing yesterday and building a similar one for another client. The clients are trucking companies, and they have close to 200 active employees, most of which have been manually entered up to now.

One client is organized in such a way that they only have drivers. It turned out that, for the bridge application we were working on yesterday, we'd done everything but assign the number values to the individual payroll items. After adding code to do that, it worked fine.

The other client is similar to the first one, but they also have hourly employees that they report on via a separate file. The challenge here was to be able to set the program up with the flexibility and sophistication to know which file it was looking at, and subsequently, which layout to use.

Setting that up was a bit more of a challenge and required more customization than I've had to do in awhile, but I figured out what needed to be done, and, after testing it on the development and production side, everything worked.

Whenever I've set one of these bridge applications up, I always sent out an email to the relevant people to let them know. They all have gone home for the weekend, so it will hopefully be a very welcoming message they receive when they return!