SALES PERSON DATA ENTRY PERSON COMPUTER A

A. Describe what is happening in this process.

It is a normal process of selling a product and recording it in the computer. It is described by the following steps,

Step 1 : The sales person contact the customer and ask for purchase. If the customer wants to buy the product or service, the sales person prepares sales invoice for sales.

Step 2 : The sales person then gives the sales invoice to customer. The customer after checking the invoice will ask the sales person to adjust selling price or any adjustment related to sales.

Step 3 : After making necessary adjustments instructed by the customer, the sales person meets the customer on a fixed time which he meet customer daily will give the invoice to customer.

Step 4 : The customer seeing sales invoice with adjustments asked by him, will accept the sales invoice, signed it and return it back to sales person. The sales person then give the sales invoice to data entry person to record the sales invoice.

Step 5 : The data entry person enters the sales details in computer. The computer stores the details data. The computer have a daily system data updation on 2 a.m. each day for A/ R data and Inventory data. Thus it automatically updates the data stored in it.

Step 6 : After the data has been stored by the computer, the entry is confirmed by the data entry operator for sales invoice.

Step 7 : Atlast, the entry for sales is made by data entry person in the computer.

B. What process mode is used to record sales in the computer ?

In general, all mathematical, financial and accounting calculations relating to numbers are recorded by the "Electronic Data Processing Mode" by the computer. The computer is an electronic device that stores its information in electronic mode only. This method of data processing is easy, fast and accurate.

C. What are some of the input risk for this process ? What controls could be used ?

As the data is stored electronically by the computer, it cannot made much mistakes. But the mistakes may happen in some forms like,

• Misreading Errors may occur due to the recorder or user records the information incorrectly. For example, instead of recording 5 02, the user may record S 02. This results in wrong calculations and wrong answers.
• Transposition Errors may occur may occur when the user of computer entering the numbers or alphabets in a wrong order. For example, instead of typing 896, the user record it as 869. It is also called computational errors.
• Overflow Errors may occur if the result of calculation is very long which is more than memory space of computer. For example, if the memory space of computer is only 5 bit character, then the error of overflow will occur if the result character has 6 bit character. The overflow error also happens due to rounding error, alogarithm or logical errors.

The following measures should be taken to avoid or reduce error in electronic data processing.

• The data entry operators should be given awarness about mistakes made by them and how it affects the business and how valuable the information is.
• The company should provide proper lightening, working space, breaks, erogomic furniture to reduce muscle pain and computer monitor with lower glare to reduce employees' eyestrain.
• The company should avoid giving more work to employees as they are stressful and unhealthy to do over work.
• The employees must give more importance to accuracy of information. Every information should be checked double times by the employees to reduce errors. Maintaining accuracy is more important than maintaining speed.
• Many software tools were helps to reduce errors like Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), etc. Installation of such tools may reduce computerized errors automatically.