Employee salary information is very confidential, yet many companies maintain salary and bonus information in Excel spreadsheets, and often email these files as attachments to large distribution lists. A simple oversight by someone could put this information in the wrong hands and cause headaches for the HR department and other managers.

We did a project for a company to simplify their annual salary review process. With our solution, Human Resources did not have to send out Excel spreadsheets containing confidential data to each manager. Instead, each manager received a blank “Compensation Adjustment” spreadsheet that was connected to a SQL Server database. Each manager simply retrieved their employee data into the spreadsheet. XLhub’s back-end logic made sure managers got to see the data only for their direct reports. The managers then entered salary adjustment recommendations in the spreadsheet, and instead of emailing the file back to HR, they simply “pushed” the data to the SQL Server database.

Since all managers pushed their data into the same database table, reporting was extremely simple. Additionally, confidential data did not travel through the email system. And, no one had to individually consolidate data from multiple Excel spreadsheets.