Connie

If you have EmployeeID, Date, Actual, Budget. These can be best summarised
in a pivot table.

You can connect this directly to SQL. There are a ton of great P/T sites,
here is one and I have a section on connecting external sources, grouping,
etc.

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Pivots/pivotstart.htm (Jon Peltier and Debra
Dalgleish's)

http://www.nickhodge.co.uk/gui/datam...ablereport.htm (Mine P/T)

http://www.nickhodge.co.uk/gui/datam...rtexternal.htm (Mine External
Data)

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
DTHIS
web: www.nickhodge.co.uk
blog (non-tech): www.nickhodge.co.uk/blog/

"Connie" wrote in message
...
I'm looking for the best way to compare actual labor costs that I have in
an
excel file to another excel budget file. In my "Actual" file - there are
multiple rows for each employee b/c of labor distribution. I have been
using
Vlookup to do the comparisons but am wondering if there is a better way.

In addition to MTD comparison I would like to do YTD comparisons. My
payroll is in SQL database - could data query help???

--
Connie