A sample of report development efforts, the kind of reports and the solutions they provided.

1. Sam Spritzer
Report Development Efforts and Solutions
Report/Solution Description Problem being Solved Company Type
Monthly Financial Report – a Facilitated management review – all Internet/ecommerce
compilation of over 20 reports in one, required reports in one file. retailer and
completed with a hyperlinked table of Efficiency – all reports created as PDFs, wholesale
contents. Reports included financial merged, and emailed to selected distributor
statements (Bal. Sht., P&L, Cash flow, individuals with one process.
Budget vs. Actual), graphs/charts,
operational statistics.
Monthly Operations Report – a Facilitated management review – all Home Health
compilation of approximately 15 required reports in one file. Agency
operations reports, graphs/charts. Efficiency – each report represented a
tabbed worksheet in one Excel file
emailed to selected individuals in one
process.
Daily NOC/Helpdesk Metrics Report – a Information was being stored on a Network Operations
series of performance measurements. hosted SharePoint platform. The Center/Helpdesk
information had to be Service
validated/corrected. This was achieved Organization
by populating and MS Access database
and reporting off of that. The reports
were emailed to selected individuals
daily. The entire process was managed
within MS Access and triggered by a VB
script.

2. Sam Spritzer
Report Development Efforts and Solutions
Report/Solution Description Problem being Solved Company Type
HHA Supervisory Visit Due Report – an Compliance – patients receiving HHA Home Health
exception report which identified visits are required to be seen by an Agency
patients that receive Home Health Aide HHA Supervisor every 14 days. The
services and, who have not yet had a application did not have functionality to
visit from the HHA Supervisor. perform this requirement.
Efficiency – eliminated the need to
manually review every patient’s
schedule to see if there is an HHA
Supervisory visit.

3. Sam Spritzer
Report Development Efforts and Solutions
Report/Solution Description Problem being Solved Company Type
Accounts Receivable Reconciliation Efficiency – eliminated the need to Internet/ecommerce
Process – the sales records and the manually match transactions and retailer and
receivables were on two different prepare daily journal entries. Journal wholesale
systems. Both systems were manually entries were prepared as part of the distributor
reconciled and the appropriate entries matching process, below.
made by journal entry. System overhead – because the
transactions were never reconciled, they
were considered “open”. This
prevented the records from being
archived and caused the database to
grow. Eventually, performance
suffered. Using a MS Access database
along with VB, matching using common
information between the two systems
was performed. Those records that
matched were marked as closed and
the archive process moved them from
the production database to storage.
Eight Day Appointment Calendar – each Efficiency – eliminated the need to log Home Health
clinician’s schedule for the next eight onto the application, run the scheduler Agency
days. and print. This was an automated
process that ran overnight, created the
calendar in PDF format and emailed to
each clinician.

4. Sam Spritzer
Report Development Efforts and Solutions
Report/Solution Description Problem being Solved Company Type
Sales by Category by Brand – for a user Facilitated management review – Internet/ecommerce
defined date range, the primary level is because there were over 700 brands retailer and
the product category. Drilldown on that within five categories, management was wholesale
gives the next level which is the brand. not only interested in the “big picture” distributor
Drilldown on the brand gives a listing of but also wanted to see those that did
all of the transactions for that brand. not meet a certain profit margin level.
Those brands that had a profit margin We were able to achieve two objectives
less than a user defined (prompt) with one report.
number were color coded. Efficiency – the color coding allowed for
a quicker identifying of sub-par
performing brands.
Insurance Enrollment file – before there Efficiency – using an MS Access Technology
were formal EDI standards, insurance database, mapping tables were created company
companies were requesting benefit to convert the data. This kept us from
information in a file format they defined. having to constantly revise the program
In some cases, the information had to code every time something changed.
be manipulated. Innovation – the client was the pilot for
what eventually became the insurance
company’s EDI system.

5. Sam Spritzer
Report Development Efforts and Solutions
Report/Solution Description Problem being Solved Company Type
Financial Flash Report – a cross-tab Efficiency – the user never had to run Home Health
report (spreadsheet) with dynamic rows this report. It was triggered monthly Agency
and monthly columns based on a using the task scheduler. The row
revolving twelve month period. information was updated automatically
as new financial codes were added and
the columnar information was based on
the last twelve months. The report was
rendered into a spreadsheet.
Innovation –the organization had
multiple locations, some on an older
legacy system and others on the new
system. The challenge was to extract
the information from both systems
directly. This was achieve through the
use of sub-reports.

6. Sam Spritzer
Report Development Efforts and Solutions
Report/Solution Description Problem being Solved Company Type
Cash flow Report – a highly complex Facilitated management review – the Consumer products
report which not only reported actual rules were established by management manufacturer
cash flow but based on “what-if” and reported. The “what-if” scenarios
scenarios and rules which were were also controlled by management.
maintained in a table, projected future All of this was controlled by prompts that
cash flow. management could update and save
under their own user name.
Efficiency – time saved by not having to
maintain spreadsheets.
Accuracy – this report was based on a
single set of data that was verifiable and
auditable.

7. Sam Spritzer
Report Development Efforts and Solutions
Report/Solution Description Problem being Solved Company Type
Report cards – a local school district did Consistency – the existing report cards School district
not like the canned report cards. not only had to be formatted accordingly
but graphics and other information not
available in the system had to be
included. Different graphics had to be
shown for the various school buildings.
In addition, there was certain non-
mandated information which had to be
reported that was part of a separate
system.
Efficiency – due to the large volume of
students (7,000), the report cards were
mass produced from a central location
and forwarded to printers at the
appropriate school building.
HIPAA 270 – in order to determine if a Efficiency – eliminated the need to Home Health
rd
particular patient is eligible for Medicare, manually input information into the 3 Agency
information must be transmitted using a party’s system via web browser.
3rd party clearing house. This was a Cost savings – eliminated the need for
temporary solution pending the long customizations. The application vendor
term solution which would be built into was scheduled to release this as an
the new system. The file was created in enhancement in a future upgrade.
the appropriate format for uploading
through the 3rd party system.

8. Sam Spritzer
Report Development Efforts and Solutions
Report/Solution Description Problem being Solved Company Type
HIPAA 271 – this would be the Efficiency – eliminated the need to Home Health
response from the HIPAA 270 manually review. The 3rd party system Agency
transmission. If denied, the file contains required to user to select the patient and
various codes and explanations. could only display that patient. A web
based report was built to display the
contents of the entire 271 file with a
drilldown to the specific patient
information.
Jenkins Act Compliance – the Compliance – full compliance with Internet/ecommerce
organization was required to report to Jenkins Act. The appropriate retailer and
each state all tobacco sales shipped to information was reported in a format wholesale
customers in the specific state. that looked similar to an invoice (in PDF distributor
format). As part of the process for
creating the report, the scripts read a
user maintained table that indicated
whether the documents should be
printed on paper or transferred to a CD.

9. Sam Spritzer
Report Development Efforts and Solutions
Report/Solution Description Problem being Solved Company Type
Invoices – The “out of the box” manual Efficiency – eliminated the need to print Consumer products
process was very inefficient. Invoices the standard 4 part invoice and manufacturer
were generated daily but batched and manually separate each part. Created a
mailed weekly. In many cases, they cover sheet (statement) that supported
were misplaced. And the monthly batch the batch of invoices. A new process of
that went to the sales reps. was also allowing the customer to choose hard
incomplete due to missing invoices. copy by postal mail or PDF by email
was implemented. 90% of the
customers chose the PDF by email
option. In addition, the sales rep copies
were sent to them this way on a monthly
basis.
Cost savings – eliminated the need for
four part invoice paper; reduction in
postage; estimated 50 man-hours per
month.