Theses

In the past, working with an IT system was always connected with recurring "batch" final runs. On the one hand, they were necessary because there was only limited data storage capacity and one could and had to delete transaction data after so-called daily, monthly or annual financial statements.

However, financial statements in DP were also necessary for non-dialogue-oriented applications in which the actual data processing was only started as a "batch job" after complete data acquisition - via punched tape, punched cards or later on the screen of so-called data acquisition workstations (daily financial statements, statement of account etc.). After a "computing time" dependent on the computer performance, the result was usually made available to the user in the form of a printout.

From a technical point of view, such regular "closings" no longer have to be carried out, storage capacity and processing speed of modern data processing systems are usually large enough to process data immediately and make it available to the user in the long term.

However, the "financial statements" to be drawn up in the context of a reporting system or reporting are still necessary: in this case, it is necessary to collect accrued company figures from the data stock. In theory, it should therefore be quite sufficient to start corresponding database queries or evaluations and then present the results to the management as "financial statements". Unfortunately, the quality of the data is often insufficient to be able to pass on such figures immediately without checking them.