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Farewell, My Spreadsheet
Debt Database Debuts, Delivers!

Chris W. Malins

Nostalgia is a nice thing. People covet old homes, cars, furniture, even old Pez dispensers. But nobody likes an old spreadsheet. And an old, unruly spreadsheet is what the debt area in Treasury has been using for many years to manage outstanding debt, payments, and future transactions. Like a pair of rabbits in the spring, this old spreadsheet has multiplied over the years, with additional tabs, files, rows and columns making it unwieldy, redundant, and most of all inefficient. This is not the kind of antique anyone would want on the “Roadshow.”

A happy confluence of events led to the development of a solution to this problem. First was the addition of Wayne Sugai to the Debt area in October of 2005. Wayne added yet another voice to the chorus demanding a better system for managing debt data and was a big part of the brainstorming discussions that culminated in a solution. The second important event was when Sam Senturia came on board in Treasury and agreed to help develop an Access database for the debt portfolio. Sam is trained in database design and has worked in MAA, GCA, and Payroll helping them with their systems needs.

Sam worked with the debt group (Wayne and Chris Malins) to determine the needs for this database. He had us identify the types of information that we wanted to track, the format of the information, any regular queries that needed to be made from the data, and the best way to enter data into the database. With this information in hand, Sam created a test database with entry forms, queries, and a way to dump the data into Excel. Many subsequent discussions followed, and each time the database improved. The application is now chock full of data and is used daily in the Treasury Office. As the database has developed over the last few months, a few bugs have been fixed and even a few (gasp!) keying errors were discovered.

The next step is to make the database available to other interested departments on a read-only basis. Financial Accounting and the Budget Office have both expressed interest. It is a lot of fun and quite rewarding to be part of the overhaul of an outdated system. The upfront work can be daunting, and good planning is important, but when the system is up and running at 100%, the new debt database won’t be considered an “antique” for many years to come.