Coming to grips with auditape;

              Coming
to grips with
Auditape
Man, as a tool-using animal, must have
learned in the Stone Age that tools are
not worth much unless you know how
to use them. Yet learning to use tools, as
any artisan knows, takes experience
and usually much painstaking practice.
When the tool is a new one, you have
to learn not only how to use it, but what
can be done with it. The inventors of
basic handtools are lost in the mists
of history, but the Hepplewhites and
Chippendales who used them are not
likely to be soon forgotten. A whole
generation passed between the time
when James Watt patented the steam
engine and the day when the first ship
was propelled by steam.
The H&S Auditape System has been
called an important advance in audit­ing
techniques for the computer age.
It is reasonable to expect that experi­ence
will reveal vast and unexpected
opportunities to use it. But like most
new tools, Auditape may not give up its
secrets easily. We have no master
craftsmen preceding us to show us how
to use it to full capacity. Finding new
applications for Auditape will challenge
our ingenuity, because some of the
problems it can help to solve are nei­ther
elementary nor obvious.
Ingenuity will flourish best if we
have a clear understanding of how
Auditape works and then learn to look
at problems from new angles until we
find solutions. The following case illus­trates
how ingenuity and persistence
were combined to solve a client prob­lem
in an imaginative way.
A client maintained his open ac­counts-
payable invoices on magnetic
tape in variable-length format. The for­mat
is described as variable-length be­cause
the record pertaining to each
vendor might contain a different num­ber
of characters from every other ven­dor's
record. In this case, after a header
record consisting of 90 characters of
identification data, the tape contained
a variable number of invoice records of
30 characters each. Following this
there was a trailer, or summary record
for each vendor, of 40 characters con­taining
totals of year-to-date payments.
No. of Date of Paym't
inv. last to
paid paym't date