Accounting Information Systems (Acc200)

Assignment 2 - Session 3, 2013 (201390)

 
Question 1 (25 marks) (word limit guide 300 – 400 words):
Your Manager has recently heard about the use of “Digital Dashboards”, but is unsure what they are and how they can be used.  Prepare a summary for your Manager explaining what “Digital Dashboards” are and how they can be used to improve business performance.  Include information on a potential supplier of this type of product.
1. A dashboard is an electronic interface often with single page, which is well designed for acquiring and consolidating overall data across an entity, and can be numerically and graphically readable by managers or senior executives who want to know the current status and historical trace of an entity’s keyperformance indicators. Dashboard can give you more real time snapshots of company’s current state of affairs, business’s financial health, relevant warnings, etc. While capturing the flows inherent in the whole business processes that they monitor, which can help in letting administration make timely and informed decisions.
2. Dashboards allow people to capture and report specific data from different departments within the organization, so employers could create a type of digital dashboards that show chosen business information that has often been tagged by the multiple information processing software.
Dashboards may cover the whole transaction-processing cycle, including financing cycle, H&M cycle, expenditure cycle, general ledger & reporting cycle, revenue cycle, production cycle. If company creates such digital dashboard that can track all corporate functions. Employers may access all of company necessary data with just a few clicks and keystrokes, thus making our work more efficient, for example After HR’s R&D on the link between working efficiency and employee satisfaction. They found if a change is made in salary or benefits plans, the counterpart changes in working efficiency indicator can be more easily understood by administration by the digital dashboard. Other metrics can be easily displayed as well, such as time-to-fill, training costs and various demographics. Building a digital dashboard requires detailed understanding of the presentation layer and its underlying architecture. It’s not only about digesting data from the first place, but it really does matter a lot to management decision-making, that is, about how to process with those data. So the success of achieving better performance by the digital dashboard often depends on the in-depth statistical analysis based on the metricsthat were chosen for monitoring. For this point, employers can set Key performance indicators, balanced scorecards, and sales performance figures as main pre-set indicators in the content appropriate on digital dashboards, adjustments can be made throughout the year, thus can give administration more certainties to make right decisions. 
Question 2 (25 marks) (word limit guide 300 – 400 words):
“Bring Your Own Devices” (BYOD) present new possibilities and challenges for Corporate Network Infrastructures. 
Outline the benefits and complications that arise from BYOD devices (eg. Smartphones, Tablets and Wi-Fi Laptops) in relation to Corporate Networks.
The BYOD or “bring your own device” concept is one of the latest trends that are stormily sweeping through corporations and enterprises all over the world. If companies want to be outstanding as both competitive in your line as well as adorable by employees and potential intellect that tend to get aboard your ship, the best option to keep up is to stay on top of the latest trends and business models. BYOD has changed how workers operate, which gives Workers more options: either bring their own devices into the workplace or will work on these devices when away from the workplace. BYOD has set more expectations followed by new opportunities and challenges.
The Financial Gains of a BYOD Workplace: BYOD can have huge benefits for company budget and productivity as more employees decide to stay connected away from the workplace, for example, It can lower support costs, as employees work using their own devices they already know how to use, that is much simpler than the more complicated laptop computers that require patching and other maintenance. Gains of Employee Efficiency: BYOD can bring ease and flexible room to employees. Averagely, under workplace structured by the BYOD, employees are reported to work up to an additional 20 hours per week, which means more gains generated for company under this working mode. Besides, instead of IT departments being able to force a particular set of IT solutions on the workforce, employees now expect to be able to use the smartphones, I-Pad, laptop etc advanced working tools, which will definitely improve their efficiency at work.
However, this new computing practice leaves businesses at unique stake that can threaten corporate data security. Owing to their portable attribute and integration with public cloud applications, personal mobile devices may cause data leakage or theft. In fact, a survey pointed out that nearly half of the companies that allow personal mobile devices to connect to their main network have suffered data secure crisis. So IT managers, security professionals, Chief Information Officers need to figure out a better way to support internal staff with easy to manage, secure mobility solutions. IT departments and Chief Information Officer’s use network-management tools to control over corporate date security, enforcing strong encryption and coding data from lost devices go against internal info-risk. However, more pressure from needs of internal network security upgrade will be on IT department as the mobile working environment changes dramatically. The cost of maintaining control over corporate date is increasing. Therefore, most companies will be stuck in protecting internal data from leaking out while providing a user experience that fosters happy and productive employees.
Question 3 (20 marks) (word limit guide 200 words):
How do professional bodies and Codes of Ethics help in deterring frauds? 
There are some steps that organization should take in order to prevent, deter and detect fraud. And companies should establish the following fundamental practices:
Ø  The culture with honesty and high ethics: research suggests that the most effective way of carrying out measures to reduce wrongdoing is to put them under a serious of core values. It provides a platform on which a detailed code of conduct can be well constructed, and gives more guidance about what behaviors are permitted and prohibited, based on values of the organization as well as applicable laws. As to antifraud processes and controls: the internal controls of a company should form both secured and effective environment. Moreover, the company’s value system and culture should support employees in declining to be involved in a fraud and provide ways for claiming their wrongdoing.
Ø  An appropriate oversight process: senior management should consider establishing an open line of communication with members of management one or two levels below senior management to assist in identifying fraud at the highest levels of the organization.
Ø  An integrated highly control system: senior management should set up two lateral control systems: administrative control system and accounting control system. Administrative control system are defined as those measures, which establish written codes of conduct targeting at employees, develop personnel recruiting, hiring  and training policies, and even document the organizational structure in entity. Accounting control systems are designed to help ensure safeguard of assets and reliability of financial records. Its functions can be divided into four categories: computer access, backups, security, application control (a specific module of the accounting system).
Question 4 (30 marks):
Mr. Jimmy Cash owns a number of successful businesses.  He has become aware of some irregularities in one of his businesses “Cash Enterprises” and has asked you to investigate.
Your initial investigations uncover the following information from Sally the bookkeeper:
1.    Regular transfer of unauthorized payments into her personal investment account
2.    Paying herself for overtime that was not worked
3.    Paying herself additional Superannuation amounts
4.    Weekly payments of $5000 to Bill’s Cleaning Services (run by Sally’s husband) for routine cleaning services
5.    Sally never took leave, claiming that her role was too important to be absent
 
Write a Business Report to Jimmy outlining:
·         What risks and internal control issues were uncovered in your investigation
·         Recommendations to Jimmy to avoid these risks in future
Answer: “Cash Enterprises” face very severe internal control risks, which may lead to a large amount of money loss, and obviously employee ethics issue needs fixing up straight away. From the text, it reflects three major issues: traditional employee embezzlement, fraudulent financial reporting, and employee occupational ethics issue.
Recommendations: “cash enterprise” has a very loose accounting supervision system. Each transaction should carry management’s general and specific authorization, especially from CFO or internal auditors who should take charge on each in and out cash deal. “Unauthorized” means huge neglect from senior management. Use the following steps to assist with authorization:
Ø  Set up a restrictive accounting control system: data access, data process, data audit, backups. For example, when a transaction is finished, accounting department should get the real and legal invoices. After bookkeeper enters these accounts invoices into an accounting software application, auditors should validate the number on these invoices to help sure that realness of each transaction. If anything goes wrong with these numbers, auditors can directly report to corporate management, boards of directors and audit committees. Strengthening internal audit, company have to set up a very professional and quality auditor team.
Ø  Set up a mutual supervision platform: boards of directors, corporate management, and audit committees should share with the outside auditor the duty of detecting as well as deterring fraud, while management designs and implements antifraud systems and procedures, strong oversight by the audit committee or board of directors is crucial. These bodies should be continual to evaluate management’s identification of fraud risks, implementation of antifraud measures and maintenance of the appropriate tone at the top. Active oversight reinforces management’s commitment to creating a culture with zero fraud tolerance.
Ø  Set up a restrictive approval levels. Before bookkeeper record final data into software application. It should be authorized twice one by a supervisor, another by business owners and managers, to make sure the accuracy and legality of these data.
Ø  Base employee’s behavior on a serious of core values. It provides a platform on which a detailed code of conduct can be well constructed, and benefit employees in declining to be involved in a fraud and provide ways for claiming their wrongdoing.