That's what Brad Barron had in mind when he was looking for some other way to deliver internal financial reports. Barron, pharmacy systems coordinator at Bashas' United Drugs, a 75-year-old regional supermarket/pharmacy chain based in Chandler, Ariz., is responsible for all corporate reporting for the company's 64 pharmacies.

"I'm kind of a one-man show... and as we grew, that task became more and more cumbersome,'' notes Barron, who administers the system used to produce and bill prescriptions. Barron was spending hours producing reports and then faxing them or attaching PDFs to e-mails and sending them out on a twice-a-week basis.

"I got to the point where I was sending out 600 reports a week manually that way, and it was taking me literally four to five hours a week just in the delivery process."

Barron does all his financial reporting in a data warehouse and then moves the information into Microsoft Access. The information includes business analysis, the number of prescriptions being filled and their retail value. Some stores receive as many as 10 different reports of between one and four pages each twice a week, he says.

"My main interest wasn't from a corporate standpoint as far as ROI; it was my time,'' he says.