Wanderlust Ltd (WL) is an adventure company operating out of Australia’s Northern Territory, providing helifishing, quad-biking, mountain-biking, skydiving, swimming and trekking experiences. WL’s customers include the general public, as well as domestic and international travel agents selling packaged tours. In order to remain competitive, WL expanded into the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) domain in 2019 – thereby allowing customers to make bookings online.

Recognising the need for an interface between the web-based booking system and the general ledger, WL upgraded the existing accounting software. They also updated their existing hardware in order to be able to cope with the additional speed of processing, and the increased storage space requirements.

WL had great plans for the future, and during the year ended 30th June 2020, they upgraded their entire general ledger system; forthwith, an integrated purchasing module and an accounts payable module were installed on all company desktops.

As part of the planning you have identified the following relevant IT application controls (AC) and IT general controls (GC) for the integrated purchasing and accounts payable modules:

1. The B2B purchasing system operates through an exchange that restricts access to only appropriately authorised entities.

2. The B2C purchasing system provides an order confirmation page where customers must confirm their transaction details before proceeding to the secure payment part of the system.

3. The integrated purchasing module is coded to automatically generate sequentially numbered purchase orders for each new order received.

4. To generate a purchase order within the integrated purchasing module, the purchasing clerk enters the supplier’s code, adventure code, and quantity ordered. The cost and price are automatically retrieved from the costing and pricing master file, and entered on the order.

5. Supplier details are stored in an approved supplier master file, with each approved supplier allocated a unique code. The system is coded so that orders with non-approved suppliers will be rejected.

Required: 

For each of the controls listed above explain: a. How you could test the control. b. What result you would expect to get if the control was not working.