Ted & Jack, pretty competitive brothers. Both accountants. Jack, studious, excelled in class. Ted, the social brother got by on his personality. As their careers progressed the competition continued. Both ended up as Controllers at manufacturers running Visual ERP.
One month-end, Jack’s boss came into his office “Hey Jack – These gross profit numbers don’t look right. Says we made 90% profit on brooms. 50% is more like it. Can you look into it?” Jack put his nose to the grind-stone and started investigating.
As the universe would have it, Ted’s boss, came in with a similar question. Ted got to work quickly immediately going to Charlie in IT. Charlie looked up and quickly stated “I don’t know what you need but I can’t do anything today. I am up to my eyeballs in a big project.” Next Ted went to Liz. “Can you please create a report?” Ted begged. To seal the deal, he added “I will buy you lunch.” Ted many times relied on his charm. Liz agreed being smitten.
Back at the broom factory. Jack used Excel, MS Query and linked directly to Visual ERP tables. He pulled sales and cost of sales. Jack sliced and diced. Within an hour he found the problem. “No wonder the costs were out. Over the holidays, someone charged the labour and materials for 10 brooms but made 1,000.” he muttered under his breath. Then he looked at the calendar. “Now I understand. It was the morning after the company party. Production must have had a little too much fun”. “Thank goodness for Excel. It’s like magic finding these issues”.
Ted and Liz put their heads together. Liz was doing her best but Ted was having a hard time explaining. Liz shrugged and thought “He has no understanding of databases. It’s going to take a while. Thank goodness he’s charming.” Back and forth they went – all afternoon. Finally, at 4:30, Ted got a couple of reports he used to dig into the problem. 7 PM he had his answer. Ted quickly created an email to his boss with his findings. Then the message popped up “Jake’s hockey game 6 PM”. Ted exclaimed in frustration “Oh snap!! I totally forgot. Jake (named after his uncle) will be so disappointed.”
Just then an email from Jack popped into Ted’s in-box. “Hey Ted – Great game. Been here since the puck dropped. Jake is playing awesome. Just got a hat-trick.” Gee if Ted only knew how to use Excel with Visual, he would have made the game.
Learn more about using Excel, MS Query with Visual ERP – CLICK HERE.
