Week 2

This week I worked with spreadsheets and entered data from account statements. For example, I took note of changes in account balances, and entered deposit/withdrawal and interest/dividend data. One thing that made the process go a lot faster was the using equations in excel. Instead of havig to type all the numbers into a calculator to add them all up, excel will add up numbers via a simple equation. This was a huge time saver.

After entering all the data came the real time consuming part. All the statements had to be scanned into pdf documents. The scanner is this big clunky thing. The most annoying part as that the scanner didn't remember the settings you typed in the scan before; for every new scan, you have to specify where the document is to be scanned to (for my case, it was the intern computer), make sure you check that the document is to be scanned double sided, and, if necessary, scan the document in color (this is necessary for some statements where the numbers look gritty and hard to read if not scanned in color). And even when you do all this, sometimes the pages of the paper stick together and you have to re-scan the whole thing because a page is missing on the pdf. Which means you have to count every page of every document and make sure the document and the pdf match up. It took me all day to scan in and check just a stack of documents.

I mentioned in a reply on my last post that it poses a security risk to electronically receive the documents. The process of scanning documents is different than receiving them electronically because they are at no point of the scanning process being delivered via online means. Although they are now stored on the computer, they are not at risk to be stolen.