CHAPTER 2

* Overview of Business Processes

SUGGESTED ANSWERS TO DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

2.1 Table 2-1 lists some of the documents used in the revenue, expenditure, and human resources cycle. What kinds of input or output documents or forms would you find in the production (or conversion) cycle? Students will not know the names of the documents but they should be able to identify the tasks about which information needs to be gathered. Here are some of those tasks: * Requests for items to be produced * Documents to plan production * Schedule of items to be produced * List of items produced, including quantity and
What are the advantages and disadvantages of following this advice? To what extent should accountants be involved in producing reports that include more than just financial measures of performance? Why?</para></question></general-problem></problemset> There are no advantages to accountants focusing only on financial information. Both the accountant and the organization would suffer if this occurred. Moreover, it would be very costly to have two systems rather than one that captures and processes operational facts at the same time as it captures and reports financial facts. The main disadvantage of this is that accountants would ignore much relevant information about the organization’s activities. To the extent that such nonfinancial information (e.g., market share, customer satisfaction, measures of quality, etc.) is important to management, the value of the accounting function would decline. Moreover, accountants have been trained in how to design systems to maximize the reliability of the information produced. If relevant information is not produced by the AIS, there is danger that the information may be unreliable because the people responsible for its