To ensure hourly staff received accurate compensation, Karen Tobat, Management Advisory Services Director from Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, assisted her institution in determining payment amounts for each eligible employee. Tobat used CaseWare IDEA®, a data analytics software, to join information from multiple non-integrated sources, append additional calculated fields, and identify specific criteria within a large recordset. The process of determining payment amounts for all hourly personnel first required a computation of average weekly hours, then a creation of time segment transactions (i.e., amount of time spent on various tasks), and finally an import of these time segments back into the timekeeping system. This process also revealed full-time staff who were subject to losing leave at the end of the fiscal year, as well as employees that have not recently worked but were still active in the payroll system. “Working closely in platforms such as these, you often uncover other areas for improvement,” said Tobat. “In this instance, we discovered opportunities to protect our employees and keep our databases clean and up-to-date.”