Monday, February 12, 2007

Feeling smug

Our fundraising area issues monthly reports on specific campaigns. Their definition of what can be "counted" (per national fundraising guidelines and internal division of duties)for the reports and the totals shown in the general ledger (fed from their system)can be rather ... different. As a result, I'm charged with reconciling their reports to our system each month.

After months of cross-checking account by account for one segment of the report, I finally took the time to write a specific query to return only the accounts they include in their report. Why am I feeling smug? I was able to do this by setting up include/exlude, not like and other parameters rather than listing each of the 80+ accounts to include. It wouldn't be a big deal, except for our 16-digit, 4-segment account numbers and not-necessarily-logical-or-sequential grouping of various university units. It's not elegant, but it returns the right data.

Hey - it's Monday - let me have the small victories!

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