Supervision
Some firms have too few employees to achieve an adequate separation of functions. These firms must rely on supervision as a form of compensating control. By closely supervising employees who perform potentially incompatible functions, a firm can compensate for this exposure.
Supervision can also provide control in systems that are properly segregated. For example, the mail room is a point of risk in most cash receipts systems. The individual who opens the mail has access both to cash (the asset) and to the remittance advice (the record of the transaction). A dishonest employee may use this opportunity to steal the check, cash it, and destroy the remittance advice, thus leaving no evidence of the transaction. Ultimately, this sort of fraud will come to light when the customer complains after being billed again for the same item and produces the canceled check to prove that payment was made. By the time the firm gets to the bottom of this problem, however, the perpetrator may have committed the crime many times and left the organization. Detecting crimes after the fact accomplishes little; prevention is the best solution. The deterrent effect of supervision can provide an effective preventive control.
Accounting Records
Chapter 2 described how a firm’s source documents, journals, and ledgers form an audit trail that allows independent auditors to trace transactions through various stages of processing. This control is also an
important operational feature of well-designed accounting systems. Sometimes transactions get lost in the system. By following the audit trail, management can discover where an error occurred. Several specific control techniques contribute to the audit trail.
PRENUMBERED DOCUMENTS. Prenumbered documents (sales orders, shipping notices, remittance advices, and so on) are sequentially numbered by the printer and allow every transaction to be identified uniquely. This permits the isolation and tracking of a single event (among many thousands) through the accounting system. Without a unique tag, one transaction looks very much like another. Verifying financial data and tracing transactions would be difficult or even impossible without prenumbered source documents.
SPECIAL JOURNALS. By grouping similar transactions together into special journals, the system pro- vides a concise record of an entire class of events. For this purpose, revenue cycle systems use the sales journal and the cash receipts journal.
SUBSIDIARY LEDGERS. Two subsidiary ledgers are used for capturing transaction event details in the revenue cycle: the inventory and AR subsidiary ledgers. The sale of products reduces quantities on hand in the inventory subsidiary records and increases the customers’ balances in the AR subsidiary records. The receipt of cash reduces customers’ balances in the AR subsidiary records. These subsidiary records provide links back to journal entries and to the source documents that captured the events.
GENERAL LEDGERS. The general ledger control accounts are the basis for financial statement preparation. Revenue cycle transactions affect the following general ledger accounts: sales, inventory, cost of goods sold, AR, and cash. Journal vouchers that summarize activity captured in journals and subsidiary ledgers flow into the general ledger to update these accounts. Thus we have a complete audit trail from the financial statements to the source documents via the general ledger, subsidiary ledgers, and special journals.