Our labor extract comes from EPMLive, which is what we use for both timesheets and capital project/portfolio management.  The timesheet extract has the fields including: Resource name, Charge Type (capital, expense, support, non-work, admin), Project name, Task name, Week Ending date, Regular Hours, and OT Hours.  It has detailed hours down to the task, which is great for granular analysis.  But it's not fun for tying tasks to towers/services/applications.  Our system is not set up to gather that information and store it when the tasks are created, so it becomes a manual job for me to make those assignments every month.  Fun!  I dump everything into an Access database, and then set about the mind-numbing task of updating any new tasks for the month.  Thankfully, most of the tasks within a project tie to the same tower/app, so it's just a matter of copy/pasting from the existing tasks to the new tasks, but still, it's admittedly not an ideal situation.

We also have a Resource Master extract which gives us other attributes for the Resource: Building Location, Country, Vendor name (for contractors), Employee ID (for FTE's), Manager, Director, Regular Rate, OT Rate, Resource Type (employee, intern, contractor-staff aug, contractor-project), Vendor classification (strategic, preferred, niche, other).

Have you thought of creating a lookup table/data set and doing lookups against that (if you have a one to one mapping for your various categories to resource towers)?

Yeah, I've given it some thought, but there's enough that's not 1:1 that it makes an automated routine more trouble than it's worth.  I find it ends up being easier just to scan down through the list and look for anything that doesn't have an ITRT.  Thankfully, the list of new tasks every month is not huge... if it was, I would probably kill myself.

Gosh don't do that - then someone else would have to suffer through that stuff!  KIDDING! That stinks it's not 1:1, tho.  Are there any other variables that could be tied in to make it more unique?  Something that would create differentiation between those ones that are alike?  You're prob way more savvy in Access than I - I do most of my cleanups in Excel with various IF/vlookups