Value of Value in Kind: Marriott

One of our VIK accounts that I must update monthly is that of Marriott which, as a sponsor, donated several hotel room stay credits for our representatives to use. There are several different locations and styles of hotels and executive apartments available for a set number of vacancies, the total number of which was available on the first Marriott-related spreadsheet I ever saw. Every subsequent monthly workbook was updated with the number of room credits used during the previous month, for instance "10 rooms used in Marriott [Location name] during [month]." I then opened my spreadsheet "Marriott prices," which I assembled from an old email that was saved in "Outlook file format" which, when not working on a computer with Outlook installed, cannot be viewed in any other program. In order to type in the price and multiply by the number of rooms used in the various months, I had to somehow install Microsoft Outlook 2010 without having matching instructions from the University of Memphis's IT website (instructions only given for Office 2003 and Office 2007), so I installed my Hotmail account in Outlook (a huge waste, but necessary). I went through each of the Marriott location worksheets calculating the market value of the room usage for the month. After I calculated the last value for hotel ratesThe workbook consisted of several sheets: Totals and the titles of subsequent sheets were the names of their various locations in which we have credits. The Totals sheet has a sum function next to the cell "Total for " that I use to link the products from every sheet to a master sum function and eventually total out the usage for the month. Once I have verified the arithmetic and number entry, I will attach it to an email and send it to my supervisor Emily; the body usually contains the total for the month to give her a heads up. What she does with the information is to record it in our monthly financial statements as "Income," and that's how important my job can be sometimes. They constantly impress upon me the difficulty and relevance of what I am doing, and though it can sometimes seem routine, there are so many facets and people I must speak with to get data that it keeps me in my toes. Much like everyday life here!