Page 207 - Accounting Information Systems

178 PART II Transaction Cycles and Business Processes

only field that uniquely identifies each record in the file. This is the preprinted number on the physical source
document that is transcribed during the keystroke operation. In systems that do not use physical source docu-
ments, the system automatically assigns this unique number. The PK is critical in preserving the audit trail. It
provides the link between digital records stored on a computer disk and the physical source documents.
ACCOUNT NUMBER and INVENTORY NUMBER are both secondary keys (SK) as neither of
these keys uniquely identifies sales order records. For instance, there may be more than one sales order
for a particular customer. Similarly, the same inventory item type may be sold to more than one customer.
Hence, the values for these keys are not unique. Their purpose is to locate the corresponding records in
the AR subsidiary and inventory master files.
A simplifying assumption in this hypothetical system is that each sales order record is for a single item
of inventory. This one-to-one relationship is unrealistic because in reality one sales order could include
many different inventory items. In Chapter 9, we will examine more complex file structures that permit
the representation of one-to-many (1:M) and many-to-many (M:M) relationships that are frequently found
in business transactions. At this point, however, avoiding this complicating factor will facilitate under-
standing of both automated and reengineered systems.
1
Figure 4-16 illustrates an automated sales order system that employs batch processing. The greatest
impact from this low-end technology is seen in billing, inventory control, accounts receivable, and gen-
eral ledger. These previously manual bookkeeping tasks have been automated. The two principal advan-
tages of this are cost savings and error reduction. By automating accounting tasks, a firm can reduce its
clerical staff and its exposure to many forms of errors. Other clerical and operational tasks including sales
order taking, credit checking, warehousing, and shipping are performed manually in this system. The
tasks presented in Figure 4-16 are described in the following sections.
Sales Department
The sales process begins with a customer contacting the sales department and placing an order. The sales
clerk records the essential details and prepares multiple copies of a sales order, which are held pending
credit approval.
Credit Department Approval

When credit is approved, the sales department releases copies of the sales order to the billing, warehouse,
and shipping departments. The customer order and credit approval are then placed in the open order file.

Warehouse Procedures
Next the warehouse clerk receives the stock release copy of the sales order and uses this to pick the
goods. The inventory and stock release are then sent to the shipping department.

The Shipping Department
The shipping clerk reconciles the products received from the warehouse with the shipping notice. Assum-
ing no discrepancies exist, a bill of lading is prepared, and the products are packaged and shipped via
common carrier to the customer. The clerk then sends the shipping notice to the computer department.
KEYSTROKE
The automated element of the system begins with the arrival of batches of shipping notices from the shipping
department. These documents are verified copies of the sales orders that contain information about the cus-
tomer and the items shipped. The keystroke clerk converts the hard-copy shipping notices to digital form to
produce a transaction file of sales orders. This is a continuous process. Several times throughout the day, the
keystroke clerk transcribes batches of shipping notices. The resulting transaction file will thus contain many
separate batches of records. For each batch stored on the file, batch control totals are automatically calculated. 2

1 A variant on this system, which uses sequential flat files, is discussed in this chapter’s Appendix.
2 Batch controls are designed to manage the flow of large numbers of records through the system. They consist of summary figures
pertaining to the number of records in the batch, total dollar amount of the batch, and a hash total of a nonfinancial field. See
Chapter 17 for a detailed discussion.