Gary is the purchasing officer for a medium-sized company. The current system for approving the purchase of goods and supplies requires the signatures of the relevant manager on hard copy internal forms. Sometimes this approval can take over a week from the initial request from an employee for certain items before arriving in his office and his staff taking action and placing the order.

After consulting with the IT team and financial systems experts, it was arranged that administrative staff for each department can place an order electronically on the finance system and log it. The system considers the request, matches the staff number of the person requesting the purchase and sends a summary to the designated authorizing officer, who can authorize the purchase electronically; if the purchase is in excess of the authorizing officers limit, the details are sent to the manager for approval.

Approvals now take one working day and approximately 90 per cent of orders are placed with the supplier within one working day.

Consider the above case scenario and answer the following questions:

1. Identify the system that was previously implemented by Gary, along with the IT team and financial system experts, to ensure purchasing approvals were conducted in a timely and efficient manner.
2. Write a brief report, on the above case scenario, emphasizing Time as a valuable resource for efficient management of a financial system.
3. Identify and explain the issues that need to be considered before designing and implementing a financial management system.
4. Identify the organizations resources used in establishing financials systems and how are these resources allocated?
5. Compare and contrast the manual vs computerized accounting system.