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

Thursday, December 10, 2015

HFAC Accounting Dashboard - Darin Hillyard

Executive Summary


The HFAC is full of artists. Brilliant artists, but not artists who care about accounting or expense reports. As such, we accountants have a lot of transactions to manage, and a lot of guiding professors to get what we need in order to process their purchases. In order to process transactions, we need to receive receipts for charges that show up on BYU’s Y-Expense site. I work for three different departments, which only compounds the magnitude of transactions I need to manage, and receipts I need to request.

BYU’s existing Y-Expense site (purchasing.byu.edu, a.k.a. Y-Expense) posts information about transactions, but in a way that requires lots of toggling, page switching, etc. Basically, it is very difficult to see everything that needs to be done. Users can only see pieces of it at a time.
Beyond viewing the problem, it is time-consuming to communicate the problem to faculty and get receipts. With the amount of daily transactions spread throughout three departments (about 62 employees, not including their TAs), we need to continually be in contact with faculty about their countless transactions. Writing individual emails for each faculty takes lots of time, but when we do not take that time to email everyone, we don’t get receipts. After 15 days, unprocessed charges become university compliance issues. So transactions need to be processed less than 15 days from their creation.

The Dashboard workbook is an optimizer for working with Y-Expense transactions and communicating with faculty about documentation needs. This workbook automates essentially two processes: 1) interacting with Y-Expense to get all of the data we need and organize it into an easy-to-use report, and 2) filter through outstanding transactions and automatically email them to the corresponding faculty. This email will contain a standardized message, with a changing table of transactions.

Note, the code for this program will only work for authorized employees in the HFAC department of Art, Design, or Theater and Media Arts. Currently, there should only be four people that this program will work perfectly for.

Also, faculty email addresses have been erased for privacy. The email macro of this program has been disabled, and email addresses that WOULD receive emails are printed in the immediate window of the VB editor. An example list of transactions has been put into the Y Expense sheet to test the email portion of the program.

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