Linking names to specific performance across sheets - even if names aren't always present

Hi,

I'm at my wit's end and would appreciate some help ENORMOUSLY!

I'm currently building a payroll spreadsheet with the following idea in mind: the macro sheet, summarizing two weeks of work, will have all the employee names with the aggregate $ amount of their daily work, giving a final total. Behind it will be 14 micro, daily sheets with the specific performance per employee. We need this kind of day by day transparency for non-payroll, operational reasons.

Of course, the point is for the macro to connect to the individual micro data for each employee. I'm attaching the file with its tabs - it's still a draft so it has a lot of unfinished crap and weird details, but the structure behind the issue below is there (though it has only two micro day tabs).

The two huge problems are these:

1. The employee roster isn't the same every day. Some folks will only work two days a week, others three, etc. And it's unpredictable, so I can't even build a specific schedule for each day of the week through the daily tabs. I'm trying to figure out how I can get the top, macro sheet to identify IF the employee is working that day (ie, if his name is present in the micro sheet), and if so, to count his payroll totals. Could one get it to scan the range behind it, look for a name (which has not been defined, because we still don't know the names of some of the people we're going to hire), but based on the cell that name will occupy, look for an exact match from the content of that cell, and if it's there, to fill out the payroll totals on the same row? Am I nuts?

2. In my desperation, I thought of just having every employee name (a max of 20) in the daily tabs, even if they weren't working that day, and match them up to the macro int he exact same order, row by row. Not ideal, but ok. The problem is that I used a VLOOKUP in the daily tabs to calculate how much they get paid; it tells you what their hourly wage is based on the number of applications they brought in. My solution was just going to be to include blank spaces for all names, always in the same order, and if employee X didn't show up or doesn't work that day, you just kind of skipped him. However, this doesn't work because with the VLOOKUP, any employee with zero applications is still paid $10/hr (it's a safety net of sorts). But then people who don't work that day would still be getting paid $10/hr, even if they weren't even there because that's how the pay scale is built even for people who WERE there.

I hope I'm being clear. Thanks so much for your help & cheers!