Your audit client is a large retail chain with its own credit card, with annual sales of
about $100 million. On December 31, there were approximately 40,000 open accounts
with total receivables of approximately $18.5 million. Very few customer balances
exceed $1,000. The company’s general office maintains the accounts receivable records.
The large volume of transactions processed by the company has necessitated extensive
segregation of duties and frequent balancing of data during processing. Accordingly, the
company’s general and system controls are considered to be very good. A complete
record of each customer’s account is stored on a relational database and includes the
following information:
Description of field contents
Type of account (personal, corporate) Customer account number
Customer name and address Credit limit (code for 8 credit levels)
Status code (Active, inactive, bad debt) Number of transactions this month
Current month’s charges Current month’s payments
Total Outstanding Balance Aged balance over 30 days
Aged balance over 60 days Aged balance over 90 days
Aged balance over 120 days Year account opened
Year last active Total purchases this year to date
Total returns this year to date Number of months active
Total purchases last year Number of months active last year
Source transactions are store purchase invoices, payments, and adjustments. Daily, all
the orders are received and entered into the computer and processed against the
customer master file. Each account is updated and automatically analyzed to determine
whether the transactions just processed have created a condition that should be brought
to the attention of the authorization or collection sections. Exception reports are
automatically printed and forwarded to these groups.