Executive Summary:
Background and Problem-
The BYU Technology Transfer Office deals with patenting of
research of inventions developed at BYU.
In order to get these inventions and discoveries patented we deal with
outside law firms to do the prosecution and we receive invoices from them on
work they do for us. In order to keep
track of the different technologies that are being patented and the legal fees
that are being accrued we manually input the invoice data into an Access
database. From this database we have to
pull information that generates reports to show how much is being paid to each
law firm, so that payment can be approved by both the licensing professionals
associated with each technology, as well as BYU General Counsel and the BYU VP
of Research.
In order to develop these reports the accounting students
would have to manually pull in the information from Access to an excel sheet
and split each amount into categories so that the licensing professionals can
review the bills related to the specific technologies they deal with. After making these reports, having them
reviewed and signed, and payment is made, the accounting students would then
create invoices manually for each licensee of the technology that has contract
with BYU to use the patented technology.
This has created many errors in the past, that have had to be corrected
and my hope is to eliminate human error involved with the creation of invoices.
Solution
In order to solve this problem I developed a process that
would automatically generate the reports for each licensing professional to
review, with a chart of the amounts paid in each operating unit (each operating
unit is related to a technology) and the amounts that will be invoiced for
reimbursement by the licensee of that technology, if any. The macro also created the invoices that will
be sent to the licensee’s that need to reimburse our legal expenses. In order to not have human error in the entry
and tracking of invoice amounts, the macro also opens and populates a separate excel
table that is connected to a table in Access, thus eliminating the need for
human entry.
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