Cory and Danny joined the meeting. We were going over some custom labels and pushing them up to the servers.

After Danny left, Cory and I went in and did some research and fixed some paycheck stubs for a client. They had changed some stuff up mid stream and retitled (renamed) certain special fields without worrying about what was already stored in those same fields. The year to date values do simple math and add up whatever was in a certain column. So, it was showing numbers that were off because they changed multiple columns without thinking about past entries and other values that had been added to those same columns over the years. We made the fixes and let the client know.

Here is a more detailed version of what was going on. We allow for 5 special virtual buckets per person to store whatever values they need for payroll and paycheck stubs. For example: say an IRA, dental plan, meal plan, child support, insurance, or whatever. These values could be added to or taken away, before or after taxes (payroll stuff). They get to name the buckets as they see fit and apply any settings that are needed. It is totally up to the users or admin users as to what is used and/or needed. Well, image if you were putting in $200/month into an IRA account (pretend that was in bucket 1 of 5). Then you decided to switch the name of that bucket to Dental and it only had $30/month as its value. The math behind the scenes says - add up bucket 1 and show the year to date total. Basically, bucket 1 had a number of IRA amounts and some dental amounts - all mixed into bucket 1.

To fix it, we had to pull a bunch of data and then reset everything to the correct bucket with the correct name. Not super tough, but kinda a pain and took some time. That is a drawback if making things super dynamic and totally user defined (aka generic). On the up side of things, if you allow the users to only setup what is needed, you don't store extra data and you don't have to think up every possible special account in order to store the data. Instead of having 5 custom buckets to store values in, you would have to have 30-50 buckets with all kinds of hardcoded titles (allowing for all possible solutions - too many). We opted for the user-defined dynamic bucket vs every possible option and then not use even a fraction of them. Choices...