AAA Reports and Accountability

The point of this post is to discuss the AAA reports each commander signs every month. BLUF: I created a spreadsheet to help scrub AAA 162 reports, if you want it, please email me on my .mil account so I can encrypt it and send to you. If you don’t already know, I was an Advanced Individual Training commander, so the lion share of challenges I faced were administrative ones. Because of this, I became very familiar on things that are often seen as unimportant.

AAA reports are incredibly important in establishing official accountability. For a normal unit, it is probably quite easy to “scrub” the reports. Since you have limited throughput of Soldiers leaving and joining the unit, you probably know everyone. For my AIT company, this wasn’t the case. Most weeks, we would graduate 54 Soldiers and receive a new set of 54 Soldiers in their place. Accountability was always a challenge.

The AAA 162 and accountability go hand-in-hand. However, the AAA 162 can be inaccurate, especially with constant changes in who’s in the unit. Signing an inaccurate AAA 162 can have severe consequences, essentially you are saying you have someone you don’t or that someone who is present for duty in your unit is not. An inaccurate AAA 162 is essentially a false report.

So what to do? As most commanders do, I constantly looked for ways to save time and effort around the company. One thing I saw was my 1SG spending hours and hours and hours scrubbing the reports, by hand. For a unit with nearly 600 Soldiers, this is a daunting task. We needed some way to do it faster and more accurately.

Some context, my unit kept an Access Database as our system of record for accountability. Our PSGs religiously updated it to ensure full accountability of personnel. Among the information stored was SSN, DOD ID number, and other information which helped the headquarters complete reports in a timely manner.

During Holiday Block Leave operations, which if you ever have been involved in IET operations, you know it is a monster, I had an epiphany. What if you used an Excel spreadsheet to compare the listed SSNs on the AAA 162 to the SSNs in your unit’s system of record (using conditional formatting)? A few weeks later, I had built the spreadsheet and decreased the amount of time to scrub the reports at least by half. Some issues were below:

-The AAA 162 document must be copied using the “copy with formatting” option in PDF.
-Some SSNs will be split across page breaks, this must be manually fixed and the split SSN re-inputted.
-You will need to use the “Clean” function to remove special formatting on the SSNs, or conditional formatting will not work properly.
-Ensure you encrypt everything dealing with the spreadsheet, since it has a large amount of PII.

So what does this get us? Basically, the spreadsheet allowed me to focus time elsewhere and also complete one thing to cover me. Every month, I would send my reports up with a cover sheet. The cover sheet was a memorandum stating all the deficiencies for the AAA reports (not just the 162) and asking the BN S1 to fix them. All supporting documentation was included in the packet. The packet would be a scanned PDF (50-80 pages, depending), so I could reference it if any one ever questioned the validity of my reports.

I’ve uploaded a copy of the memorandum I used, again, if you’re interested in seeing the spreadsheet, please contact me on my .mil account. Hopefully, this is useful to someone else other than me!