Small thing, but real work with a real deadline, so posting it.
We were asked for a summary of break clauses across a portfolio. 60 leases, abstracts in a mix of Word documents and scanned PDFs, produced by three different firms over about fifteen years. Normally this is two people for a week.
What I did: I wrote out the eight fields I wanted and, for each one, what a valid value looks like and what to do when it is missing. That brief took most of an afternoon and it is the only reason the rest worked. Then it went through the documents in batches of ten and produced a table with a source quote next to every single value.
The source quote was the whole trick. Checking a row took me forty seconds instead of going and finding the clause myself.
Four rows out of 60 were wrong, and all four were the same mistake. Where a lease had been varied by a later side letter, it took the original break date and ignored the variation. Once I knew that, I checked all 60 for side letters directly.
Two days, one person, and I trust this table more than the handmade ones, because every value in it is quoted.
The source quote next to every value is what I am taking from this. My problem has always been that checking a summary costs about what producing it cost, so the summary saves nothing. A quote beside the number changes that arithmetic completely.
Stealing it for supplier claims this week.
Same reaction. The other thing is that a systematic error is the good outcome. Four random errors in 60 and you are checking all 60 forever. One repeated error and you either fix the brief or go and check one specific thing across the set, which is an afternoon.
Did you add the side letter question to the brief afterwards, or is it still a manual check?
An afternoon writing the brief, for a job that used to take a week. That is the part everyone skips. I have watched colleagues make two vague attempts, get rubbish back, and conclude the whole thing does not work.
Also good to see a non code example on here.