The ChatGPT Game Changer: From Hours of Searching to Two-Second Solutions with Instant Code Suggestions

I did an exciting thing last week.

As part of my continuous improvement efforts, I've been wanting to streamline the process by which bank transactions become a daily journal entry into our ERP. Along the way, every bank transaction will get coded to the proper GL account. Sufficient supplier and customer information will be captured for quick reconciliation of payments and receipts.

There are probably systems that already do this. I don't have one. I won't wait for one. So, I just set about building it myself.

My initial roadblock was the format of the bank data. All the ACH and Wire details come in one long string of text, which must be parsed into usable pieces of information for a database.

I've used SQL in a lot of automation tasks, but I have never parsed a line of space delimited text.

Historically, when I've wanted to do something new, I have searched the internet for it. There are a lot of very helpful people out there giving advice and posting solutions to questions that people like me have usually already asked.

It can sometimes take hours, perhaps an entire weekend, to figure out how to write that one piece of code to properly do what I want.

This time, instead of going to the search engine, I went to my new buddy, ChatGPT.

Seconds. Maybe... one and half. It recommended some SQL code.

I tried it. It didn't work. I told it so.

ChatGPT responded, "You must be using an old version of SQL Server. Use this..."

I wrote back with new error message, and it responded, "I'm sorry, use this..."

That worked. Hours saved.

I did not try using ChatGPT for the whole project. I learned something new, and continued on my way, modifying the code for the next round of parsing that I needed to do.

But, the experience has made an impression.

ChatGPT is a game changer.