My JavaScript muscles feel just a little tighter lately, thanks to my job. At least, compared to how they were a week ago when I was just getting started with the task of formalizing our budget. What started out as a way to ensure our company was “recession-proof” (not that our organization managed to reap any real benefits from the “good times”) has turned into a major all-consuming crusade to ensure our success.

The task of gathering the necessary data from various computer systems & paper records would, under normal circumstances, be fairly straightforward. Unfortunately, there is the dark ages: the period of time our company wasted attempting to appease to a hopeless, outdated, expensive and disabling petulant child of an Inventory/Financial software package. Extracting information from this opaque mystery is both time-consuming and painful.

The other problem I have been facing is a chart of accounts (both in the aforementioned train-wreck, and in its replacement which we have been using for a full fiscal year) which lacks some of the granularity a leader would need to make good decisions & steer the ship away from the rocks.

Now that I’ve compiled most of what is needed, I needed to make sure it would be used. The eyes of some in the staff tend to look a little glassy after being exposed to only a few “numbers” (indicator ratios, statistics, bank balances), so it’s important that:

By the way, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is available on amazon for those who are working on their Christmas shopping

Awesome book, though I would settle for Visualizing Data by Ben Fry

After a couple of gigantic spreadsheets and one attempt at an OpenOffice Access database, and not feeling particularly good about the results, I decided to deploy it as a web app over the company intranet running on my workstation’s web server. It was looking pretty good, but I’m not fantastic with ajax-style interactivity so it was still half-baked. That’s when I came across ExtJS, which has sped up the production & increased the quality of the application in most areas, but the learning curve for the massive, object-oriented & JSON-related JavaScript library has been hellish.

Here’s a screen shot of what it’s shaping up to look like:

I’m really learning a lot from this entire project process in part because, if anyone else in our small business is able to handle any of these tasks (I’m thinking of the owner, manager & the bookkeeper as 3 people under whose jurisdiction this might fall) they sure aren’t stepping up to the plate, and I am receiving absolutely no guidance or help in creating a sustainable (company staff will be able to use this tool ad infinitum once it is finished) way for to keep our heads above the water in hard times. I’m having to learn new techniques & terminology, analyze and discover trends that can be used to lead.

It’s a very tiring process, so I hope it pays off and I retain some wisdom from the whole experience.