The data-entry job that became my first business tool

Near the end of my 2018 internship at Icyumba Mpahabwenge, I was given a large task: enter a whole year of the business's activities into Excel.

I did the data entry. While I was doing it, I saw that typing records wasn't the real problem.

Looking past the task

The business had a year of transactions and no simple way to answer basic questions. How much came in this month? Where did the money go? Is this month better than last?

So instead of only filling in rows, I built an income and expense tracker in Excel. Entries went into a structured sheet, and formulas did the totals and summaries that would otherwise have been worked out by hand.

It wasn't software in the way I think of software today. But it was a tool that solved a business problem, and the people using it understood it straight away because it lived in a program they already knew.

Being noticed

During the internship, interns were expected to pay a contribution for consumables. Mine was waived because of what I had built for the business.

When I finished in December, the manager told me, "I am seeing something in you, keep it up."

Nobody had said anything like that to me about my work before. It was the first time I understood that what I built could matter to someone else's business.

What I took from it

Solve the problem behind the task. I was asked for data entry. The business needed visibility over its money. Delivering the second is what made the work valuable.

Build in the tool people already use. A spreadsheet was the fastest way to give that business something it could use the same day. I used the same approach a year later for school reports.

Small recognition carries a long way. One sentence from a manager shaped how seriously I took my own work.