Computerised Accounting System — Meaning and Need

A Computerised Accounting System (CAS) is a system of maintaining a business's books of account using accounting software running on a computer, in place of writing entries by hand into paper journals and ledgers. The underlying accounting principles a Gujarat Std 11 Accountancy student has already studied — the double-entry rule, the classification of accounts, the preparation of a trial balance and final accounts — do not change at all. What changes is only the tool used to apply them: once a transaction's details are keyed in as a voucher, the software itself carries every later step (posting to the ledger, balancing accounts, drawing up the trial balance and the financial statements) forward automatically, applying the very same rules a human accountant would have applied by hand.

Why a computerised system became necessary. As a business grows — more customers, more suppliers, more daily transactions, more branches — the pure manual method described elsewhere in this book becomes slow, exhausting, and increasingly prone to small clerical slips that are hard to trace. A computerised system was adopted to solve exactly these growing pains:

• Volume. A manual clerk can post only a limited number of entries correctly in a working day; a computer can post thousands within seconds, without tiring.
• Repetition. Posting the same transaction to two or more accounts (as double entry demands) is repetitive, mechanical work — precisely the kind of task a computer performs faster and with far fewer slips than a human copying figures by hand.
• Speed of reporting. A trial balance or a set of final accounts that might take a manual bookkeeper days to draw up and re-check can be generated by software in moments, at any time, not only at the year's end. …