INSTRUCTOR

OVERVIEW

Each of us who teaches Accounting Information Systems faces the problem of providing students a comprehensive, but interesting knowledge base of AIS. However, we all know that it is difficult to find the right balance of coverage of technical concepts and student comprehension. When addressing this issue of balance, we began to see clearly that a better, more comprehensible approach was needed. With this book, we have achieved a good balance of covering technical concepts while still making the text easy to read and understand. Our textbook also reinforces AIS concepts with relevant, real-world examples and reasonable end-of-chapter materials.

This text incorporates the important content found in a typical Accounting Information System course, but has four distinguishing characteristics. Four characteristics we focus on throughout the text are simplicity and understandability of the writing, business processes, accounting and IT controls, and ethics as it relates to accounting systems.

We place extra emphasis on the students' understanding. We explain AIS in the context of business processes and incorporate many real-world examples. The richness of these examples improves the text, the discussion questions, and end-of-chapter exercises and cases. We explain IT controls by employing the framework in the AICPA Trust Services Principles. This is an encompassing, but easy to understand, framework of IT controls. Finally, we believe that ethics continues to increase in importance as a topic to be included in accounting texts. We have included an ethics section in each chapter.

We think that including all these characteristics in a single text has resulted in an extremely user-friendly product: one that will help your students achieve a better foundation in accounting information systems.