Discuss about the Research Program for Accounting Information Systems.
Summarization is the primary function of an AIS. As per Sealehi, 2011, it’s a mechanism that performs following tasks:
All of these tasks that it performs are with the objective to offer segregated and proper information for any financial events. These compiled data can be stored and used to analyze by all the stakeholders. Apart from these it also keeps records of inventory and presents daily as well as weekly financial reports. This study illustrates the fact that incorporating AIS has several advantages like reduction of cost of production, improved productivity, enhanced performance, multitasking ability, better flexibility, better work flow, better quality of work and better integration of suppliers. Apart from these are several other advantages AIS carries which makes it very unique opportunity and beneficial for an organization to utilize this.
Disk4U specializes in selling CDs and vinyl records. They have four different outlets around Sydney. Currently they find their consumers through their brick and mortar shops as well as through phones & emails. Most of their business used to happen through these only. But, recently they have also entered into online selling through e commerce sites. This has helped them increase their sells but has also presented them with a situation where they are now finding it difficult to manage their accounts apart from managing other operations of the business. They used to do all of these tasks manually as they have limited sales and contact points with their consumers but with the current scenario manual work is causing them lots of repeated works and there are lots many mistakes/errors happening now. To effectively handle their accounting and other associated works they are now planning to implement ERP and AIS system. This will be the right course of action for them given their current state of expansion. This will also be a cost effective option which will fit into their budget.
The AIS they have chosen is provided by QuickBooks, which is a well-known company in the area of AIA. The system that they are providing with is called Open Systems. This contains a comprehensive ERP software that is a fully-implemented system and is capable of doing all the tasked needed by them.
AIS will help company with the following:
They operate in the domain of agri-business & provide wild rice at large scale. In top seasons they have the capacity to produce around 80 tons/hour. Sungate foods have three plans at three different locations. These are basically their different facilities for different purposes. All of their operational facilities are located in Australia. They have very large employee base due to the large scale of their manufacturing facilities. Their products are sold domestically as well as internationally. Currently, Sungate foods are facing some issues that are affecting their operations as well as their business and it keeps them from reaching their full strength. First and main issue is their current system of manual recording of their every transaction and every order. Due to having various internal departments these operations are repeated over 10 times which consumes lots of their time and is also prone to errors. Their staffs are completely burdened with the tasks of preparing business and financial reports, which they have to prepare every week. Many are times due to the time taking process of preparing reports they take lots of decisions without proper report with half knowledge. There are also lots of internal confusion and inadequate data. At times, their inventory is very high as the concerned department don’t have up to data due to incomplete records. Company is in dire need of a system that will help them automate their transactions and should have in-built error checking functions. This should also help them prepare business and financial reports faster. Basically, they need a system that can help them create faster reports that will be easy to use by the administrators. Due to the fact that their operations are spread over three different locations, the system should also be collaborative and should be able to be simultaneously operated across locations.
There are many advantages that AIS can provide to the organization. Some of the advantages are:
More Accurate Information – Once AIS is fully integrated, it will provide the organization accurate and additional information for their decision making at their fingertips. This will minimize and to a larger extent obliterate the errors from their system. The information provided by them can be accessed by all stakeholdersand will be error free.
Improved Cash Flow – Managing the cash-flow for a company as large as Sungate foods is a very critical exercise. Cash is very essential for any business. Accounts receivable and payable, integrated billing, and inventory lets the user handle all the cash flow, easily and effectively.
Better Decision-making ability –AIS offers much better decision making capabilities and with real data available all the time it helps company in this regards.
Foundation for Growth –AIS implementation can help the company in its long term growth. It helps business grow multifold and hence the company. For their growth it also offers them different types of business intelligence and information required.
More Control – The integrated AIS helps in real-time user-friendliness access to the company’s information about its finances. This also offers better control and the capability to more effectively handle the business components.
For the issues that Disk4U is facing, QuickBooks will be the most suitable platform for them to adopt. There are many reasons for this. For example, QuickBooks is Intuit Inc.’s product. They are a much respected and already established company in the field of software with specializing in developing financial and tax related products. They have their customers as individuals as well as small enterprises and businesses. Their other successful software is Quicken, TurboTax and Mint. Other big reason in QuickBooks favor is that it provides specialized modules for the purpose of retail businesses. For a retail business like Disk4U, it provides many helpful features like a customized workflow to suit their business.
Some of the key features of QuickBooks are as follows. These will be very beneficial for accounting operations of Disk4U:
Accounts Receivable: QuickBooks can easily handle credit and collection tasks with minimum intervention from employees. This is because of the automated features for the general ledger, the account payable, the accounts receivable etc. With its help every aspect of Sales and the receivables can be tracked in an efficient and timely manner. These timely and vital information can then be used to better the existing system for inflow cash and in turn making effective most of the trends for sales. This system will also be capable to track the sales pattern accurately and identify the high paying customers & thus be able to forecast the sales patterns. With its help they can also assess their discounting plans and at the same time also spot early any delinquent accounts.
Accounts Payable: Just like the accounts receivable, accounts payable function also has many features for automation. With its help the accountant can prioritize in real time their vendor based payments & determine the right time for payment. An optimal cash flow can be worked out by understanding the vendors who offer the most/high discounts.
General ledger: It is a very important part of any accounting system. The system QuickBooks helps automate various aspect of a general reporting. Automation is possible as entries from all applications are auto captured in their general ledger.
Accounting – In QuickBooks, the accounting module’s 3 most prominent part are listed below.
While core accounting feature are important for Disk4U for their accounting information. They also need user friend and advanced features like pricing, advance inventory tracking, reporting etc. Listed below are the other features that QuickBooks provides to their user organizations:
Reporting: QuickBooks makes reporting much faster and simpler. This is achieved with the help of automated elements in the report which is auto filled for the retailer. They also have an advanced reporting feature that is capable of handling 1k plus lines of items & complete report generation can be automated. Creative and interactive reports can also be.
QuickBooks provide end results which are a detailed report with all the relevant and evaluated data. These reports are best organized & are displayed as per the specific industry that here is retail industry.
Inventory: With the help of QuickBooks it would be very easy for the employees of Disk4U to view and analyze the inventory and make adjustment with the inventory. They are also helped with its very capable auto troubleshooting processes. For any company in retail filed it is very important for them to under and understand when the stock of any particular SKU is low and when is the delivery date for the same. It also helps them decide on the adequate quantity of the purchase to be made. With the help of QuickBook all SKU’s stock can be seen in a snapshot and advanced reports can be generated for stock status. It also has alerts system that is auto activated whenever stock for any particular inventory is below the requisite level. This helps the concerned department take appropriate action before it can affect their day to day operations. With the help of this feature, chances of overstocking are also minimized. Inventory tracking is done with the help of serial numbers and bar codes. For these works it has in-built scanning capabilities.
Pricing: With the help of QuickBooks pricing can also be automated. This is a great function for any retail business considering the huge nos. of SKU that they need to maintain. User can enter multiple different price rules with different combinations basis the items, customers, vendors etc. Conditional rules can also be applied that can automatically recalculate the price in case of any discounts whenever needed.
Payroll: For any company employees are probably the most important part. A significant chunk of the expense goes towards employee’s remunerations. Hence, it is important that these are managed and accounted properly and effectively. Payroll accounting is another important requirement for any AIS. QuickBooks helps prepare automated calculation of various time sheets designed for multi employees. These can be done in a single batch thus it makes it easy to understand and record the working hours and days for each employee. Apart from this, information on any employees like overtime hours, PF fund, tax liabilities etc. can also be pulled easily and quickly.
Other main features and advantages pertaining to retail business are:
Xero is a popular online system for accounting that provides an accounting platform to relatively small companies, like Sungate, for managing their accounting requirements with least expense and without really affecting its main business. Key advantage of Xero is that it provides secure, easy to learn, and small but adequate accounting medium to the smaller companies to manage their business and their customers. Xero ensures that every piece of data of the company is recorded and taken care of for the management to make an informed decision basis these data analyses. As explained in the case study above, the company have their employees and inventory across the location. And, to manage these an inventory management system is their urgent requirement.
Mentioned below are some of the key features of Xero- online accounting system:
Some of the main features of Xero are mentioned below. These features make it a right solution for Sungate’s accounting operations:
Business operation automation – One of the main tasks for Sungate is monitoring their expenses. When expenses are fed in Xero by user, it can be filtered and organized in various different categories as per the requirements. This feature of Xero will help Sungate to understand where expensed can be reduced to improve their profitability. It can also help them setting up the bank rules for them. Here, user select a field and put them into its business rules to help generate and classify data as well as reports. Xero also lets users to match the pre-generated bills along with the expenses for any discrepancy. For example, if a customer makes a purchase at any location then Xero will automatically match this with the report from bank expense.
Report generation – Complete set of data is stored over the cloud in Xero. This feature lets businesses, their advisors, their related partners and all stakeholders to retrieve data any time and get reports as well to make informed decisions at much faster pace than what it would be in the manual process. This will assist the owners sun gate to identify every opportunities or any extra expenses that is being done due to geographical differences. Early generation of reports also allows company to prepare reports or budgets sheets that can also be shared with other team members or teams for their inputs. Users can also access any report online through its Zero Report Center. It also organizes reports into groups which allow management of Sungate to find the specific report related to their particular requirement like financial position, tax, payroll, business performance. Apart from this, Xero can also generate customized reports as per the requirement with more options. It thus provides more flexibility and precise reports to the owners. They can also save the report as per the inbuilt templates. Always, all the reports and data are present at its centralized place.
Inventory management – Due to having its facility at multi locations Sungate company finds it very difficult to monitor and manage its inventory. Inventory management feature of Xero is one of the best in industry. It provides very easy means to auto update inventory and also its inventory management feature is easy to learn. This will let Sungate to track real-time the quantity as well as value of the items that is being ordered as well as sold. Company will able to update their inventory in real time. With this system they will have the knowledge of their updated and current inventory. Apart from this, its inventory reporting helps small businesses make their reports and decisions by displaying remaining items that needs to be sold and the profits that can be generated.
Cloud – As the company Sungate functions from their different locations instead of operating from a single system, their users operates and updates system from multi locations. They feed and retrieve information simultaneously through different locations. Their data is spread over many computers at different locations. Therefore, to maintain data’s consistency, every data is stored over the cloud. Relevant stakeholders can easily access data to study it. Their staff can easily generate and send invoices from any of the locations. And also generates reports anywhere.
References
Carrington, A., Battersby, G. and Howitt, G. (1975). Accounting, an information system. Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs.
Hall, J. (2004). Accounting information systems. Mason, OH: Thomson/South-Western.
Biafore, B. (2010). QuickBooks 2010. Beijing: Pogue Press/O’Reilly.
Ivens, K. (2009). Running QuickBooks 2010 premier editions. Philadelphia, Pa.: CPA911 Pub.
Ivens, K. (2010). Running Quickbooks 2011 Premier editions. Philadelphia, Pa.: CPA911 Pub.
Marginson, D., King, M. and Mcaulay, L. (2000). Executives’ use of information technology: comparison of electronic mail and an accounting information system. J Inf Technol, 15(2), pp.149-164.
Nelson, S. (2005). QuickBooks 2005 for dummies. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
Nelson, S. (2007). Quickbooks 2007 all-in-one desk references for dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
O’Shea, J. (2011). QuickBooks 2010. [Fairport, NY]: Axzo Press.
University of Gothenburg, (2012). Research Program – Accounting Information Systems. [online] Available at: https://www.gu.se/digitalAssets/1362/1362778_research-programme-ais.pdf [Accessed 19 Jan. 2016].
Xero, (2012). Reviewer’s Guide. [online] Available at: https://www.xero.com/media/4681900/reviewers-guide-us-version.pdf [Accessed 19 Jan. 2016].
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