Monthly Income/Expense Reports

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>
>Amount of time per report is not a big problem ... only run this a couple of
>times per year.
>
>  
>
That's the difficulty when we allocate our time to tuning projects, 
reality vs user perceptions.

Since inefficiency when creating a report appears as a relatively large 
chunk of time (some number of seconds) it is easily visible to a user. 
In other words, suppose instead of taking 15 seconds to process takes 
30, 50% inefficient. Even though overall it represents only a small 
total wastage of time because reports are run only rarely. On the other 
hand, a much more serious wastage of time (in total) like each 
transaction taking a second for the "enter" process to work (instead of 
a tenth of a second) would not be a visible wastage to the user even 
though 90% inefficient and since one enters hundreds of transactions for 
every report run a much larger total wastage of time.

Even when these tuning projects not driven by user complaint not always 
easy to get programmers to focus on where time is really being wasted 
and where the biggest "bangs for the buck" (improvements vs programmer 
time) are possible.

Michael D Novack