Page 205 - Accounting Best Practices

c10.qxd 7/31/03 3:12 PM Page 194
Filing Best Practices
194
These steps can take quite a long time to complete and will require a signifi-
cant budget, so it is important to verify in advance that there is a reasonable pay-
back to the company from implementing it—either through reduced filing costs
or by improving the efficiency of the corporation as a whole.
Cost: Installation time:

10–8 IMPROVE COMPUTER SYSTEM RELIABILITY
Many of the recommendations in this chapter are based on the assumption that
paper-based documents can be eliminated by calling up their electronic counter-
parts in a company’s computer system. However, many controllers find that this
assumption will not work, and it meets with great resistance throughout a com-
pany because the computer system has a bad reputation for not being functional
at all times. If the system is down and there are no paper documents that are
immediately available to serve as back-up information, a company can literally
stop functioning at once. Since many departments know this, they resist all
attempts to switch to a purely computer-based information system.
There are a number of steps that a company can take to improve the reliabil-
ity of its computer systems. As many as possible of the following actions should
be taken to improve system reliability. Though even one of them is helpful, the
entire group will go a long way toward creating a ‘‘bombproof” system that
employees will have confidence in. The best practices for improving system reli-
ability are as follows:

• Battery back-ups. A computer system will experience power failures from time
to time, as well as power spikes or brownouts. All of these problems result in
computer system crashes, which corrupt data and keep the system down for
long periods of time. This problem is an especially vexing one in a manufac-
turing environment, where power spikes may occur when large machinery is
turned on in the same power grid as a company’s computer system. The solu-
tion to this problem is a simple one—just install a battery back-up, also known
as an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) on all file servers or larger com-
puters, as well as every personal computer, terminal, router, and hub—in short,
everything attached to a computer network that requires electricity. By doing
so, a computer system can be completely protected from all power fluctua-
tions. Also, batteries will become worn out and fail over time, so it is critical
to have a battery replacement schedule in place designed to replace batteries
shortly before their scheduled failure dates.
• Disk mirroring. Some companies that cannot afford to have any system down-
time at all will use two primary computers to record all transactions, rather
than the more traditional single computer. Under this system, all transactions
are recorded by two computers that are linked together and that mirror each