The article focuses on some designs of multidimensional accounting system. An accounting system is viewed as a structured database capable of supporting a class of queries or requests for data. These queries could be specific requests for data, such as the current balance of an account or the value of an inventory item, or more complicated requests, such as a profit and loss statement or a balance sheet. The traditional accounting system is oriented toward financial reports and therefore, only financial data are stored. Information on an hourly wage earner, such as number of parts produced on a given day, the average number of defects or the value added to the part, normally is not stored with the accounting data. By storing the value added information, an employee can be evaluated on terms of wage times hours versus the value added to the product. Authors' contention is that an accounting system can be viewed as an information system that supports a specific class of queries. The paper presents a process for designing a common data structure, which will support the given set of queries.

The primary objective of this paper is to review the extant literature concerning auditing and EDP systems. We trace the flow of EDP-auditing development, note salient points of similarity and difference in techniques and relate these issues to the auditors' professional responsibilities. We hope that this will contribute to efficient consideration of the past literature by those developing an interest in auditing-EDP systems. We also hope that it will encourage efficient progress in the effort to develop new EDP-auditing research. With this in mind, we have included a short section on new approaches to EDP-auditing which presents information on systems design involvement, software standardization and formal system assertions.

[Auditors are charged with the responsibility of evaluating internal control systems. Recent advances in decision support systems indicate that the speed, accuracy, and memory capacity of computers may be used to aid auditors in this task. To test this proposition, a computer-assisted method of designing, analyzing, and evaluating internal control systems, called The Internal Control Model or TICOM, was designed and implemented. The technical manual and the TICOM software are available from the authors. This paper presents the results and conclusions of that project. TICOM is a computer-based analytic tool that aids the auditor first to model the internal control system and then to query the model in order to aid the auditor in evaluating the internal control system. TICOM is based on concepts in artificial intelligence such as knowledge representation and graph simplification. It serves (1) to describe office information systems while emphasizing internal accounting controls and (2) as an aid in control evaluation. It was found that the advantages of TICOM over traditional evaluation methods are that (1) the evaluation can be more rigorous and exhaustive, (2) the documentation of the system can be more thorough because of automated completeness and consistency tests, and (3) the modeler may probe and test controls by using the query-processing portion of TICOM.]

Auditors are charged with the responsibility of evaluating internal control systems. Recent advances in decision support systems indicate that the speed, accuracy, and memory capacity of computers may be used to aid auditors in this task. To test this proposition, a computer-assisted method of designing, analyzing, and evaluating internal control systems, called The Internal Control Model or TICOM, was designed and implemented. The technical manual and the TICOM software are available from the authors. This paper presents the results and conclusions of that project. TICOM is a computer-based analytic tool that aids the auditor first to model the internal control system and then to query the model in order to aid the auditor in evaluating the internal control system. TICOM is based on concepts in artificial intelligence such as knowledge representation and graph simplification. It serves (1) to describe office information systems while emphasizing internal accounting controls and (2) as an aid in control evaluation. It was found that the advantages of TICOM over traditional evaluation methods are that (1) the evaluation can be more rigorous and exhaustive, (2) the documentation of the system can be more thorough because of automated completeness and consistency tests, and (3) the modeler may probe and test controls by using the query-processing portion of TICOM.