Acca aa s21 Notes

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One-for-one checks (C)
For example, checking that every hourly-paid employee has 
submitted a clock card.
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Control (or batch) 
totals (A and C)
Add up the value of documents before they are input. The 
computer then re-performs the calculation to check accuracy and 
completeness of input.
As described, these input controls may be described as preventative. 
3. Controls over standing data
Standing data, sometimes called reference data, is data which doesn’t change very much but which is 
used or referred to many times. A good example is the selling price of a product or wage rate for an 
employee or discount rate for a customer. The problem is that once these amounts are put in, they 
tend not to be examined continually by employees. A price once set up could last for many months 
and if it’s wrong can affect many invoices. So you have this rather unfortunate situation where the 
data once input is then subsequently largely ignored by the people involved, but it is capable of 
producing errors over and over and over again.
The only way we can be sure that that data is correct is to take deliberate steps to check it. So some 
organisations print out their standing data, perhaps 10% every month, and distribute that to people 
who should know whether or not it is correct. These people sign off the print-outs to certify that the 
data appears to be right.
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4. Processing controls
With respect to processing controls, really we want to know what processing has been done, and 
ideally we would like some indication if processing appears to be odd or out of sequence. As a simple 
example, let’s say that the wages and salary accountant is off sick towards the end of the month. How 
do you know whether or not that month’s payroll has been run? You don’t want to do it twice, but if 
you don’t do it at all employees be very upset. Therefore, some kind of trace needs to be kept of what 
processing has been done, when it was done and, ideally, showing by whom.
Run logs and transaction logs can do this. Run logs give a high level description of the processing 
which has been performed. For example it might say monthly salaries run 29th of July, 1:45 p.m. 
initiated by J. Smith.
Run logs should be scrutinized regularly by a responsible official to look for runs which appeared to 
be odd, out of sequence or initiated by on expected people. Transaction logs are also sometimes 
produced. These are much more detailed printouts of exactly what transactions have been input and 
processed. For example, a transaction log might simply be a printout of all dispatches which have 
been turned into invoices in the week or all timesheets which have been submitted. These would not 
normally be scrutinized as a matter of course, but can be looked at if the run logs appear to show 
something which is suspicious.
A 'run-to-run' control is a check that:
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the totals from one processing run (eg opening balances on the receivables ledger plus the sales 
invoices)
and
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the input totals from the second processing run (eg cheques received)
equals 
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the result from the second processing run (eg closing balances on the receivable ledger).