Page 23 - Accounting Information Systems

xxii Preface

Chapter 8, ‘‘Financial Reporting and Management Reporting Systems’’
Chapter 8 examines an organization’s nondiscretionary and discretionary reporting
systems.
• First, it focuses on the general ledger system (GLS) and on the files that constitute a
GLS database.
• Next, it examines how financial statement information is provided to both external
and internal users through a multistep reporting process. The emerging technology
of XBRL is changing traditional financial reporting for many organizations. The
key features of XBRL and the internal control implications of this technology are
considered.
• The chapter then looks at discretionary reporting systems that constitute the Man-
agement Reporting System (MRS). Discretionary reporting is not subject to the pro-
fessional guidelines and legal statutes that govern nondiscretionary financial
reporting. Rather, it is driven by several factors, including management principles;
management function, level, and decision type; problem structure; responsibility
accounting; and behavioral considerations. The impact of each factor on the design
of the management reporting system is investigated.

PART III: ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES IN
ACCOUNTING INFORMATION
Chapter 9, ‘‘Database Management Systems’’
Chapter 9 addresses the design and management of an organization’s data resources.
• The first section demonstrates how problems associated with traditional flat-file sys-
tems are resolved under the database approach.
• The second section describes in detail the functions and relationships among four
primary elements of the database environment: the users, the database management
system (DBMS), the database administrator (DBA), and the physical database.
• The third section is devoted to an in-depth explanation of the characteristics of the
relational database model. A number of database design topics are covered, includ-
ing data modeling, deriving relational tables from ER diagrams, the creation of user
views, and data normalization techniques.
• The chapter concludes with a discussion of distributed database issues. It examines
three possible database configurations in a distributed environment: centralized,
partitioned, and replicated databases.

Chapter 10, ‘‘The REA Approach to Database Modeling’’
Chapter 10 presents the resources, events, and agents REA model as a means of speci-
fying and designing accounting information systems that serve the needs of all users
within an organization. The chapter is composed of five major sections.
• The chapter begins by defining the key elements of REA. The basic model employs
a unique form of ER diagram called an REA diagram. The diagram consists of three
entity types (resources, events, and agents) and a set of associations linking them.
• Next the rules for developing an REA diagram are explained and illustrated in
detail. An important aspect of the model is the concept of economic duality, which
specifies that each economic event must be mirrored by an associated economic
event in the opposite direction.
• The chapter illustrates the development of an REA database for a hypothetical firm
following a multistep process called view modeling. The result of this process is an
REA diagram for a single organizational function.