Conveying cell relationships in a reporting environment

Consider the problem of tracking a survey's cost and progress. Management must monitor the costs of the survey on a routine basis to ensure that actual expenditures do not exceed the budgeted dollar amounts. Management must monitor the progress of the survey on a routine basis to ensure that work was completed on time. This paper discussed the automated reporting environment by which cost and progress can be monitored. Given that seven systems must be polled for the information and ten reports must be developed, it becomes difficult for the programmer to comprehend where the data originates for the cells in the reports. A somewhat simple means were developed to show the cell relationships with-in reports and between reports using a tree structure. Having the cell relationships in the requirements documentation eases the programming burden as well as tracing the final product back to the requirements and specifications.