Integrated Accounting Cycle Final Report
ACC/340

Integrated Accounting Cycle Final Report Integrating accounting cycles into a company’s financial life is important and can determine the success or failure of a company. Accounting cycles need to be incorporated or integrated and properly followed to make sure that data is enter correctly will benefit a company. The following report is the findings that the Learning Team A of the Accounting Information System I Class found when examining the account receivable accounting cycle. A description of how the account receivable cycle fits in with the life cycle when developing a system for a company. The changes the team proposed to improve the measurement and controlling the operation performance of the account receivable cycle will be examine. Systems Development Life Cycle
The accounts receivable accounting cycle is just one of many accounting cycles that make up the accounting practices and reporting that a company would perform. As discussed in previous assignments the accounting cycle of a company includes periodic and real-time reporting mechanisms interfaces to with many different modules and systems. Therefore, the accounts receivable portion of an Accounting Information System must interact with all the different systems a business process flows without negatively impacting ongoing operations. Entering data and making adjustments to credit and debits is considered a very low risk operational duty that follows the existing business flow of the accounts receivable cycle. But if Riordan Manufacturing was to identify a new business process that changed the data flow of the accounts receivable cycle those changes would need to follow the software development lifecycle process so that any changes would be introduced into the accounting systems with the least level of impact to surrounding systems and processes. Any proposed change to the system would first enter the planning phase. This would identify the project goals and project feasibility. Once the change is deemed feasible the change is established as a project where business process and data analysis is conducted. Requirements are gathered from project stakeholders and these requirements are collected and inserted into the project and identified as requirements by the process analysts. Next the project enters the systems design phase of the software development lifecycle. In this phase the data analysts convert the business processes into data processes and apply the appropriate application controls to the process flow of data throughout the system. The project then enters implementation in which the business processes and their corresponding data flow processes are developed into an automated solution. Once the software development is completed the new automated process is thoroughly tested to identify bugs or errors and ensure that the new application does not conflict with any of the existing applications and business process flows that are currently operating within the environment. Once testing is completed the new automated process is installed and made available to Riordan’s operational end users. Throughout the remainder of the project lifecycle the project has entered what is called the maintenance phase. Here the application is established in the production environment and where the application will live out the remainder of its life. During this time the application will undergo software and configuration changes, add additional functionality or migrate to different systems and hardware (Kay, 2002). It will continue to exist in this phase until the application is retired or replaced. Development of account receivable within a company
Development of a new Accounting Information System at Riordan Manufacturing requires various levels of participation from individuals and departments throughout the organization.