Accountancy · Chapter 16
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
The work of recording, classifying and summarising transactions is repetitive and rule bound, which is exactly the kind of work a computer does best. Nearly every business in Nepal now keeps its accounts on a computer, using either a spreadsheet or dedicated accounting software. This chapter studies what a computerised accounting system is, its components and its limits, how a spreadsheet is used for accounting tasks, and the features of accounting software.
A computerised accounting system is a system that records, stores, processes and reports accounting transactions using a computer and suitable software, in place of manual books. The user enters each transaction once, and the software automatically posts it to the ledgers, updates the balances and prepares the reports, so the same data need never be written again.
A computerised accounting system has the usual parts of any computer system working together for accounting. The hardware is the physical computer, keyboard, printer and storage. The software is the program that processes the accounting data, either a spreadsheet or a specialised accounting package. The data are the transactions and master information entered by the user. The people are the users who operate the system, and the procedures are the rules and steps they follow. The system works in a cycle: information is captured from source documents such as invoices, purchase orders, receipts and barcodes; it is processed through journals, ledgers and reports; and the results are stored for future use.