Quick question for women with organized brains

amother

Wed, May 29 2019, 7:01 am

My brain is not always the most organized but luckily I've been guided in life by some process-driven mentors. I'm trying to figure out the best way to go about this short term project I'd like to get out in the next couple of days and wondering if any of you more organized ladies can advise on the best way:

The project: I'm sending off some forms for an employer client for eleven employees. I'd love an extra set of eyes on these but the paras are already swamped so I'm taking this one myself.

Each of the forms is 3 pages; I'm inputting identical corporate information on pages 1, 2, and most of page 3 for all forms. The source of this corporate information is emails and questionnaires from the employer. There are some parts of page 3 where each form has unique info for each employee. The source of this information is a couple of documents provided by each employee.

What's the most efficient way to review these once they're done?

What I'm thinking is review one form's corporate info against the sources, then review all the other forms' corporate info against the first reviewed form. Then review each form's employee information separately.

Anyone have a different idea or method? Am I overthinking this?

amother

Blush

Wed, May 29 2019, 8:19 am

(op sorry I cant help you but thank you for the thread. If it makes you feel any better I am generally considered to be a very intelligent person eg brilliant scores in school and grad school , but when I read your op my eyes glazed over and I had no idea how to understand it, let alone answer it. So maybe your brain is more organized than you think it is).

amother

Wed, May 29 2019, 9:15 am

Cookiegirl wrote:

Prepare the form with the corporate info one time. Make 11 copies and then enter the unique employee data on each form. Review employee data against original sources.

Thanks Cookie - you have no idea how much I truly wish I could have done that! The way our company database works, we have a "profile" for each employee and I have to create the form anew for each one from within the system. I can't even create it offline as a separate PDF and upload it; I literally need to use the one generated from within the system.

You'd think at least it would prefill with some of company information in our system, but of course whatever prefilled was in the wrong spaces and I had to cut/paste to other sections, actually creating more work than if it was empty to begin with. (I've messaged our tech Dept about that but I don't expect to see anything done about it.) At least I'm able to download the forms off the system, so I'm able to download one, and copy/paste from it to fill the one I'm working on. But I will still have to do a final review to make sure every second was properly filled.

I'm actually thinking now that maybe I'll print all forms at once and review all sections at the same time. (For example, I'll start with line 1, make sure it's the same across all forms, then line 2, etc.)

amother

Tan

Wed, May 29 2019, 9:23 am

amother [ OP ] wrote:

Get your first one perfect.

Cut and paste from that one.

Print and hold up to the light, new one with master, when you have all of the duplicate data there. Differences will be obvious.

Then add in personal data.

amother

Wed, May 29 2019, 10:09 am

amother [ Tan ] wrote:

Omg you are a genius with the light idea. Interesting. I'm a bit skittish if it's reliable but I'm totally going to try.

amother

Khaki

Wed, May 29 2019, 1:35 pm

I worked in public accounting firm in NY over 10 years ago and in addition to checking every number individually, they also used the "light" method to compare wording in the approved draft report to the final report right before they went out, to make sure that any revisions from the original approved draft were also approved.
We mostly looked at the shape of paragraphs and at the the end of each line to see if it matched up, which gave us a pretty good confidence that no wording or extra sentences got added or changed. I am not sure if this method will be so great with a form, but definitely worth a try.