Rather than reconcile my mobile phone bill the way a normal person would do it (by say marking off items in the bill with a pen and then totalling up the hilighted items) I reconcile my mobile phone bill the following way:
- Download CSV phone bill from provider.
- BCP file into SQL Server (DTS - yeuch).
- Query a view to see “work related or possibly work related” calls.
- Update “phone number” table with new work & non-work numbers.
- Iterate over steps 3 & 4 until the number of “unknown“ numbers approaches zero.
- Execute query to calculate total.
For uber-geekiness I have already considered:
- Using biztalk instead of BCP to populate the database (I'm pretty sure this is the approach bill would take)
- Querying my contacts list in exchange to suck out all those phone numbers (expediting steps 4 & 5)
Can anybody think of any other obvious optimizations I could be doing here?