Q.Explain the limitations of computerised accounting.

The TS Inter II year Accountancy syllabus specifically lists limitations of computerised accounting as a named sub-topic, distinct from its advantages.

While a Computerised Accounting System offers many genuine benefits, the TS Inter II year Accountancy syllabus specifically requires a student to also understand its limitations honestly.

The first limitation is the high cost of installation — acquiring suitable hardware, purchasing or building appropriate accounting software, and setting up the necessary infrastructure requires a significant upfront investment that a very small business may find hard to justify. Related to this is the cost of training staff to use the software correctly; if operators are not properly trained, the accuracy and reliability the system is supposed to deliver breaks down at the very first step of data entry. The system also depends on power and working hardware — it cannot function during a power failure or hardware breakdown, whereas a manual system, however slow, can always continue on paper. Without a disciplined backup routine, there is a real risk of data loss or corruption from hardware failure, viruses, or accidental deletion, and software bugs or an unexpected system crash can disrupt work or, in the worst case, corrupt records. Without proper access controls and passwords, accounting data can also be viewed, copied or altered by unauthorised persons more easily than a manual ledger kept under lock and key, creating a risk of fraud. …

Students sometimes answer this as if it were asking for disadvantages of manual accounting (i.e. answer the opposite question by mistake) instead of g …