These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Automating Technology Transfer Processes

The Technology Transfer office focuses on taking professors’ disclosed inventions and patenting them in the U.S. and other countries. Furthermore, once the process has begun to patent these technologies, the Technology Transfer Office seeks out companies who would be interested in licensing the technology, and enters into license agreements with these companies.


Because of the nature of the work (patenting), the Technology Transfer does a lot of work with law firms outside of BYU. Currently, the process to approve and pay the law firms’ invoices, as well as subsequently billing the licensees to reimburse for the invoices paid is an arduous, manual task. This VBA project eliminates most of the manual effort (excluding data entry) involved in this accounts payable/receivable process by downloading the necessary tables of information from an access database, creating approval summaries for the director and his associates, creating summaries pages for each law firm that is getting paid, and finally creating an invoice for each licensee that has licensed a technology that was paid on.

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