Kudler Fine Foods is a fast growing company established in 1998 and their Initial store selected Microsoft Access as the database to track inventory, sales, orders, employees, and customers. Kudler’s products are perishable and inventory must be properly tracked. This paper will evaluate database tables from accounting perspective, and provide recommendations for improvement. Pivot Table and Entity Relationship diagram will help Kudler’s to build better decision-making process.
Evaluation of the design elements of the data tables from an accounting perspective.
Data Table analysis is essential to the success of Kudler, the information provided in these tables is available for the end user to determine how much inventory is available and when it require to order more inventory. The design of data tables organizes the financial data into department, financial codes, items and then sums of total amount of transaction. Data table maximize the visual and informational presentation for the financial data. The user can easily identify information that item belongs to certain department, and how many items were received at the given cost for a certain period. It allows finding total amount and quantity on hand for an item and calculating average price for an item.
Entity relationship diagram illustrates the hierarchy of how information reviewed by end users. The data represented in entity relation diagrams (E-R) includes the business entities and the relationship among them. E-R diagrams use four symbols: rectangles to represent entities, diamonds to describe relationship, ovals describe the entity, characteristics, and connecting lines depicts relationships.
Recommendation for improvements to the Data Tables
The Pivot Table is two-dimensional statistical summaries of database information and can be improved by arranging the codes chronologically and sort the data by compiling the list of product inventory levels. This will facilitate monitoring items for a department that has different items to sell. Data sorting will allow visualizing faster and finding the data they need to make effective decisions (Birnbaum, 2003).
Kudler can improve decision making through Pivot Table
Kudler’s information is overloaded with vast amount of detailed data being generated as standard operations. Data tables visualize the information and make important decision making process effective and efficient. Pivot table keep records of the inventory movement though out the entire company and provide a single centralized set of data to view. Kudler’s must be able to identify balance in inventory in each store and which items needs to re-order and which item need to stock in or out of warehouse.
With the help of Pivot table Kudler’s can quickly summarize the data from a worksheet and can discover the total, average count of the inventory items.
Conclusion
Currently Kudler’s advised some improvement required to their inventory data table and Kudler’s should update the database with data tables that allow them easily to access and calculate optimal inventory levels for each store. The upgrade will provide quality of data and eliminate redundant information.
Entity Relationship Diagram
Pivot Table
References:
Apollo Group Inc. (2004). Kudler Fine foods – Sales and Marketing. Retrieved from
https://ecampus.phoenix.edu/secure/aapd/cist/vop/business/Kudler/Finance/KudlerFAInvRpts001.htm
https://ecampus.phoenix.edu/secure/aapd/cist/vop/business/Kudler/IT/KudlerITDatabases001.htm
Bagranoff, N. Simkin, M & Strand, N.(2008). Core concepts of Accounting Information systems. John Wiley & sons.