Computerized Accounting Courses:
The Weakest Link?  

When Robin Hemmingsen, Chair of the E-Commerce Institute at Centennial College, asked me to write an article on “Integrating Technology in Accounting Education,” she had visions of our undergraduate college accounting students learning e-commerce and enterprise systems as a culminating component of our accounting program. While this year we will be wrestling with introducing both the concepts and the software into our third-year courses, the practical reality is rooted in our current first- and second-year computerized accounting courses.

An accounting or business diploma from community college is the graduates’ ticket into the job market. Employers are looking for strong computer skills and specific knowledge of spreadsheet and accounting software. To prepare students for these job requirements, most college accounting programs offer one, two, or more courses in computerized accounting. Excel is taught in courses led by either computer instructors or accounting instructors. The most popular accounting software packages taught are Simply Accounting and ACCPAC for either DOS or Windows, although other packages, such as MYOB, QuickBooks, and Great Plains Dynamics, are starting to appear on course outlines. Students become technically adept at these programs and can list them on their resumés.

The courses’ weaknesses are not with technology, but with the integration of accounting knowledge and the development of critical thinking skills within computerized accounting courses. It can be difficult to focus on these issues when you are an accounting instructor in a computer lab with 35 students and 35 computers. In the college computer lab, the accounting professor is his or her own teaching assistant and sometimes lab technician until the IT help arrives.

What follows are some of the students’ weaknesses and some of the methods that can be used to overcome them.

1. The Keystroke Syndrome

Most computerized accounting exercises are very directed, even down to individual keystrokes—for example, “Press <Tab> three times.” Students are presented with a challenge when case assignments are less directed. The better students can transfer their knowledge to the new situation; however, the weaker students attempt to apply the exercise scenario to the case scenario with disastrous results—clearly, the case company is different from the exercise company. In our new third-year advanced computerized accounting course, we expose students to two new accounting packages with minimal direction with regard to completing the exercises. It was sink or swim for the students.

2. Accounting Knowledge

Students do not make the connections between fundamental accounting principles they learning in Accounting 1 and 2. One of my A+ graduating students shone at demonstrating her skill with ACCPAC during a job test, but could not tell the interviewer how she would record a transaction dealing with deferred revenue. When asked to record the monthly amortization of $xxx on a recent practical exam, a significant number of students did not get the correct general journal entry. Choose a text that reinforces accounting aspects, not just the technical procedures, and take the time in class to review accounting concepts as well as demonstrating the computer application.

3. Communication Skills

According to our Employer Advisory Committee members, communication skills are our students’ greatest weaknesses. I started asking students to write a one-page memo to the fictional company president explaining the financial statements they had prepared at the end of a case exercise. The first results were horrible; however, by the third case, there were some meaningful improvements. Students have to understand that producing the statements is only half the job; communicating the results is the other half. At the transaction entry level, there are marks assigned for entering appropriate references and descriptions for entries.

4. Analytical Skills

For too many students, the physical printout is the end result. When batch listings are forced, some students do not bother to retrieve their printouts to check for errors before posting batches. (Entire forests are being sacrificed to teach students computerized accounting!) Students do not always analyze their statements before submitting assignments. In a recent budgeting exercise in which students were expected to analyze the budgeted versus actual results, the canned income statement added ending inventory instead of subtracting it. While most students focused on the major variances, only a few students caught the fundamental accounting error in the statement. Instead of just marking students’ assignments as incorrect, major assignments should be resubmitted until substantially correct, forcing students to learn from their errors.

5. It Isn’t Right Unless It’s Perfect

When confronted with mistakes in assignments, many students will redo the assignment from scratch in order to make the assignment perfect. I do not deduct marks for mistakes as long as the student (a) recognizes the mistake and (b) knows how to correct it.

6. File Management

This is a difficult technical skill that many students have not mastered. With larger, more complex accounting programs, data files will no longer fit on a single diskette, and backups have become more onerous to do. Students more often than not learn about the importance of backups when, after 16 hours of work on a term project, their data files are lost or corrupted. “He/she who laughs last has made a backup.” (Thanks to Harvey Freedman for that quotation.)

This article has provided a view from the trenches of computerized accounting instruction; the broader aspirations will have to be dealt with in another article. In the meantime, I would appreciate hearing from others about their experiences in computerized accounting, either in stand-alone courses or as part of accounting information systems courses.

John Stammers
Centennial College
School of Business
jstammers@centennialcollege.ca