Payroll bridge application to achieve estimated ninety-one percent cut in processing time

Today I completed work on a Microsoft Access application that transforms payroll in an Excel file into a tab-delimited text file. The application serves as a bridge from a client's payroll file to a program that is used to batch load payroll transactions.

To make this happen, there are several class modules I created in Access VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), which are set up as an object model. Some of the modules include the following:

• Batch Information (lookup)
• Company (specific info about a client)
• ConvertXL (converts Excel file to tab-delimited text for processing)
• Employee (specific info about an employee)
• File (file name, beginning/ending, etc.)
• LineText (relates to information on a line of text in the payroll file)
• Lookup (does a lookup using a recordset)
• Outlook (used for Microsoft Outlook object manipulation)
• Payroll Item (info related to a specific payroll item)
• Payroll Items (a "pseudo" collection of payroll items)
• Persist Class (a base, abstract class implemented in other classes)
• Process (does most of the payroll processing)
• Section (info related to different sections on a payroll file)
• Sections ("pseudo" collection of sections)
  

Processing payroll before having an application for this client, I've been told, took about three hours. With this tool, I estimate it will take about 15 minutes, which is a 91 percent reduction!

I'll share more about this application in future posts, since this is one we've implemented for other clients.