Lost Origins (No code, just a bad story)!

[porthrajgomes]

A few years ago I started working for a company which had lost all but one developer, and several key employees from its accounting and audit departments because they relocated their offices to a different city.

There was a very large, 10,000 + page, activity report which ran out of the financial system every quarter and had to be reconciled with an activity monitor report which was also in excess of 10,000 pages. The auditor would sit down with the physical paper reports and verify everything was showing up on the monitor report. This would take him about 3 to 5 days and had to be done for corporate compliance. I was asked to see if I could come up with a way to take the raw print files from both reports, scrape the data out and compare the two. For security purposes I could not access the systems directly and could only work with the data on the reports. After spending a few hours with the reports, I went to my manager and told her, I needed access to the systems if they really wanted me to do this. There simply wasn’t a reliable way to hook the data together from the reports because there wasn’t a common key between the reports. After getting our CFO’s blessing, they let me in, and guess what I found?

Both reports were being generated from the same database tables using the same filtered date range. One was out of the canned financial package, the other was from an MS Access database which linked into the back end. The only difference was the columns displayed, and how the reports were sorted and sub totaled. The auditors had been comparing these reports for years. I just couldn’t believe it.