Question

Wrench and company,Chartered Accountants,keeps details of its clients in its computer  records
at its office .Since it  also has time available it will allow its clients to use its computers if they require
them.If necessary Wrench will arrange for members of its staff,mainly administration but sometimes
from the audit branch to assist with the input of data for these clients.The staff from the Audit section can be involved in the audit of clients, depending upon the Audit Partners requirements.You are asked to state whether there has been a violation of the Accountants Code of Ethics and state which ethical principle has been violated and  briefly providing a reason(s) for your opinion

Answer 1

Case study discussion and proposal for different scenarios:

Cost discussed is in range rather than in numbers as those fluctuates on the plans and specific requirement, but rest assured the selected or suggested products will fit in our budget of around 25k.

Requirement 1:

“MilleniAds will produce customized sales flyers, brochures, and other branded items, such as letterhead and business cards”

For given scenario company needs to store and reproduce those images in offline copies in different sizes and layouts. For this company can utilize cloud drives to store the digital copies and for producing customized flyers, brochures, letterheads and business cards they can utilize any professional publishing software.

A. We can go for on premise based storage options which can utilize the existing hard disk shared across the office network which will be cheaper and easy to start, but its highly suggested to move to CLOUD based solutions as the provide very robust mechanism to store, coupled with 24X7 availability and replication.

Cost: low.

Examples: Google Drive, Amazon Drive.

B. For publishing software we can choose industry leader Adobe InDesign but due to cost constraints I would suggest with some other vendors like Corel, Quark, iWork or PrintWorks

Cost: moderate to high.

Examples: Adobe Indesign, CorelDraw, iWork, Printworks etc.

Requirement 2:

“Keep track of inventory, sales, and expenses”

For this part we can utilize any inventory and accounting software, combine this with power of cloud and we get a very strong platform to keep all things together and available all the times.

A. For this requirement we can go with traditional accounting software which are there for ages like Talley. But, nowadays we have robust set of cloud based software like Zoho Inventory and Books or Inflow inventory which have very simple web based interface to manage all the sales intermediates.

Cost: low to moderate.

Examples: Intuit Books, Zoho Books and Inflow inventory.

Requirement 3:

“User-friendly system for sharing information and files between employees”

For this requirement we can enforce any exchange based mail and file sharing service, and again such service based out of cloud would be preferable as it can provide high degree of availability and performance. Again such services also provide mobile application and remote access.

A. There is no point even discussing any on premise solution as we have pretty well established exchange and drive based solutions for our need.

Cost: low to moderate

Examples: Microsoft Office 365, AWS Mail service, Google drive and mail.

Requirement 4:

“They will need to access company information while on the road, in their home offices, and at customer sites”

As workforce expands, the need of work-from-home and client site will be much needed and for modern organization desktop are almost redundant at least for day to day work load and switching to hybrids or laptops are suggested.

VPN(Virtual Private Network) clients provide such abilities on the move. VPN act as gateway to organizational network over public internet in secure manner and thus accomplishing or requirement.

A. VPN client is pretty straight forward architecture to deploy and maintain, well many provider companies takes care of maintenance as well.

Cost: moderate to high.

Examples: Open VPN, Microsoft VPN, NCP Entry client

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THANKS