Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

10–10. Improve Computer System Reliability

Many of the recommendations in this chapter are based on the assumption that paper-based documents can be eliminated by calling up their electronic counterparts in a company’s computer system. However, many controllers find that this assumption will not work, and it meets with great resistance throughout a company because the computer system has a bad reputation for not being functional at all times. If the system is down and there are no paper documents that are immediately available to serve as back-up information, a company can literally stop functioning at once.

There are a number of steps that a company can take to improve the reliability of its computer systems. As many as possible of the following actions should be taken to improve system reliability. Though even one of them is helpful, the entire group will go a long way toward creating a “bombproof” system that employees will have confidence in. The best practices for improving system reliability are as follows:

• Battery back-ups. A computer system will experience power failures from time to time, as well as power spikes or brownouts. All of these problems result in computer system crashes, which corrupt data and keep the system down for long periods of time. This problem is an especially vexing one in a manufacturing environment, where power spikes may occur when large machinery is turned on in the same power grid as a company’s computer system. The solution to this problem is ...