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 mapped with the program, and their payroll needs to be done early Monday morning for a Tuesday check date.

Last week, the client left the first column blank for one of their employees, and the payroll specialist didn't find out he wasn't paid until the day after the payroll went out. She called me this morning to have me check to see if the program would do that again. In less than 10 minutes, I was able to diagnose and fix the problem so that it won't happen again.

The code looked for something in that first column before mapping the columns into specific payroll items. In this case, the data in the first column isn't as important as that in, say, the third column. I changed the code that does the test to check the third column instead.

I'm pleased that my knowledge of how this program works lets me respond so quickly and adeptly to a problem like this.