AC2401 ACCOUNTING INFORMATION SYSTEMS (4.0 AU)

Prof: Ramchand Jagtiani
21/22 S1, mixture of Physical (First few) and Online (due to Covid) classes
Would like to drop some tips/comments, take it with lots of salt pls.

1. Prof likes to keep seminars concise. Would run through the lecture slides briefly; assumes students have read the slides (which is reasonable considering LAMS have to be done before class). Could stop him to ask questions/queries about content. Quite patient and clear in his teaching.

2. Prof has Kahoot! to recap previous weeks’ content and would explain the questions which a sizeable number of students got wrongly.

3. Prof usually would have a QnA segment just before class ends. Please ask more questions about group project cause it might not be clear from instructions given (and any other queries).

4. Start finding a company for group project ASAP. Ideally, ask people you know (family/relatives/friends) because is quite difficult to find without contacts. If your group still cannot find a company, Prof would only likely help you ask the other groups who found whether their company would be okay with helping your group with the other cycle (revenue vs expenditure) or another scope. This assessment has been around for years afaik and is unlikely to change.

5. Start the SAP Assignment late. Yes. When most people have already asked their questions on the discussion board. Look through, see the common mistakes, avoid. Ideally, do the assignment in one sitting, fully focused, don’t make mistakes because rectifying it may be a pain. Conversely, rectifying the mistakes may help you understand SAP more. But that is if you digest what Prof James explains.

6. Practise drawing flowcharts. Ideally pen and paper. (But for group project pls draw digitally. I tried both Excel and Visio and honestly can’t tell the difference in terms of ease of use.) There are quite a number of common mistakes, which would be discussed in Week 3 (?) and the last week where Prof would highlight mistakes in the group project’s flowcharts. These mistakes are very easy to make (at least for me) so would require conscious effort to avoid them.

7. I’ve always adopted a 1 mark = 1.5 minute rule for Accounting mods. So if a question is 5 marks, I’d spent at most 7.5 min on that question. Any slower means the next question would need to do faster/write shorter. However this rule won’t work for this Finals because flowchart takes a lot of time. I started with flowchart for my Finals (cos is qn 1), overshot my “allocated” timing by a lot, but sped up for the rest of the paper and managed to finish in time. If I had started with qn 2, I would have stuck with the 1m = 1.5min rule, attempted qn 2 – qn 4 at a slower pace, and likely not finish the flowchart in time (please don’t rush flowchart). Whichever way you choose, try to do qn 2 onwards fast.

8. I gave Easiness of Content a 3/5. Would have been 5/5 prior to 21/22 S1. Prior sems asked about Expenditure and/or Revenue cycle, which was covered in the syllabus extensively. However, 21/22 S1 tested on Inventory, which is a combination of both Expenditure and Revenue. You would have to know SAP really well because it is unlikely that the notes you bring in would be able to address the Inventory question adequately. The unmoderated median dropped considerably as seen in the Examiner Reports. (Student Intranet > Colleges & Schools + > Nanyang Business School > Undergraduate > Examination > Examiner’s Report) Who knows whether Inventory would come out again. 😉

9. Have fun in your group to make this mod enjoyable! 😀

Prof: Ramchand Jagtiani
Course taken in: AY21/22 Sem 1
Textbook: Not used
Required: Download SAP, Visio, Remote desktop connection (if using MacBook)
Assessments: Class participation + 1 project (1 project report + 1 presentation) + 1 SAP assignment + finals

This course is fun only during project work, and if and only if you have group mates that you can get along with. Overall, the Profs for this course are quite chill. There were discussion forums in the MAIN site for Profs to answer questions for the SAP assignment and finals preparations. Prof James mostly answered those questions, and from his responses, I can tell that he is a very amicable and approachable teacher. So, even if I did not have him as my Prof for this course, I was still somewhat able to interact with him through discussion forums.

#1 About the Profs
For AY21/22 Sem 1, Prof Tung Lai Lai was the course coordinator. Prof Ramchand Jagtiani and Prof James Ten taught the classes. There was also an external Prof for the last 2 seminars on robotic process automation. The 3 Profs alternated for the lecture videos. I can’t comment much on Prof Tung but her lecture videos were decently done. A point to note is that most students got quite frustrated with the project instructions though because they were ambiguous and resulted in wasted time, effort, and work (more details mentioned below under #2 Project).

Prof James seemed really nice as mentioned above. If I could turn back the clock, I might want to get Prof James’ class actually because he seems really competent. Prof Ramchand was also a decent Prof and I enjoyed his weekly Kahoot quizzes to recap last seminar’s topic. He also gave presents to the winning teams when we had physical lessons, although once, the winning team received mandarin oranges haha. One funny incident is that once, one of my classmates corrected Prof Ramchand on his Kahoot quiz answers because the slides said otherwise, and he was pretty dumbfounded, just saying that the teaching staff will look into it and probably change it for future semesters. So yeah, it made me kind of realise that not all the content given to us were 100% correct, and we had to be vigilant ourselves. I think this is one aspect that made the course a little more difficult.

It will also be a bit difficult to catch Prof Ramchand in person to ask him questions because he seems to be in quite a hurry most times. I remember chasing after him once. However, he replies to emails very fast (just remember to state your seminar group and team for every email). He might also speak a bit fast sometimes. But it is a blessing at times since he is able to end most seminars early (2hrs – 3hrs). On another note, I took this course in conjunction with AC2101 and AC2104. While both of them had “cooling off periods” before finals (i.e., cannot contact them around 1-2 days before the final paper), Prof Ramchand did not impose such restrictions, which is nice of him to do so since I managed to squeeze in some last-minute questions.

#2 Project
Moving on to the project work. There were good times and bad times, like any other project work.

The good:
• Grow your connections (work with a real company for project)

• Simple structured report (due immediately after recess week) that is not super demanding if you know what is supposed to be done
o My structure: introduce company  flowcharts for revenue/expenditure cycle  efficiency and control issues, impacts, and recommendations to improve

• Simple presentation (pre-recorded this semester due to Covid safe-distancing measures) that is played during Week 13’s scheduled presentation timing
o Students are required to research and suggest an ERP system to the company they work with, demonstrate the key features that will help the company, talk about the good and bad of the ERP system, and finally, conclude.

• Simple 5-10 mins Q&A after presentation
o Quite peculiar but our Prof just asked us “reflection questions” like “How did you find the company?”, “What is your biggest takeaway from the project?”, “What were some challenges you faced?” etc. Simple questions that don’t need a lot of preparation.

The bad:
• So freaking difficult to find a company to work with and no help from Profs
o Not sure about future semesters, but for mine, we had to work with an ACTUAL company to understand their revenue/expenditure cycle, create a flowchart for them, talk about their efficiency or control issues, and recommend how to improve on the issues.
o Unless your parents or relatives are like business owners or CFOs of their companies, it seemed quite ridiculous to me for this course to ask students to find and approach real companies. Especially if you lack the connections and your group mates do too, then it will feel like a disaster. My Prof also seemed to kind of want to not be involved in helping students connect with companies (due to extra workload), so it might feel like a dead end.
o So, the first step of the project work which is to find a company to work with might take a long time to settle. Hence, start this search early! The pressure won’t be there in the first 2-3 weeks because of add-drop, but it will come to hound you very soon since the project report is due immediately after recess week (yes, it is that fast).
o Just remember that the company must be an SME or bigger and must be operating in Singapore. Some groups forgot about the latter.

• If you found the company to work with, you might have to tank most of the project report
o This is actually quite logical but definitely unfair. Just that till this date, I’m not very sure how to overcome this problem. The thing is that if you are the one who found the company, you will be the contact person between your group and them. So, who knows the company better than you do? Since communication is also very one-sided i.e., you are the one messaging and calling the company, you will be relied upon to kickstart the project and lead the team. All documents from your liaised company will go through you too. It will be your duty to update your group mates on everything that the company has told you (if done in private). So, yep, it will be quite troublesome.

• The flowcharts for the project report are such a pain
o You might not realise this now, but flowcharts are not easy to do. This course recommends downloading and using Visio for flowcharts, and I am all for that too. Since NTU grants us student licenses for Microsoft apps, Visio will be free-of-charge. However, the downloading process takes quite a while.

• The 2nd part of the project about recommending an ERP system to the company had a lot of us muddled
o The problem was that the instructions for Part B of the project were pretty ambiguous.
o First, many students didn’t know that the ERP system that we were supposed to find could NOT be SAP S/4HANA (which we used during the course).
o Then, some students also didn’t know that when the project instructed us to do a “walkthrough of the ERP system” meant that we must do a live demo of the system i.e., in front of the Prof, you open the ERP website/app and show to the Prof that you are using it. What this means is that students must find a decent ERP system that will allow a free trial period, which many simply don’t.
o Also, I think for Part B, most of us didn’t know that for your conclusion, you can choose to recommend/don’t recommend/recommend with precautions, the ERP system you have presented. Many of us think that whenever we talk about a new system, we must recommend it albeit with limitations. However, my Prof said that we can actually choose whether or not to recommend.

#3 SAP Assignment
There’s nothing much to say about this except that it will definitely take more than a few hours to get everything done. Some students underestimate the assignment. Although relatively straightforward, it is extremely tedious because there are many steps to each process, and you might even have to work on things that have not been taught before (not to worry because the assignment worksheet will guide you through it meticulously). A tip is to check the MAIN discussion forums while doing the SAP assignment. The Profs don’t tell you when the forum is created but it will be there. Students are given the chance to ask anything about the assignment, including problems they encounter, and the Profs answer wherever they can. There was 1 problem I faced while doing my assignment and brushed it off as something that I could not solve and hence let it be. But it was only after I visited the discussion forum then I realised that others had the same issue as me and Prof James actually mentioned how to overcome it. So, lesson learnt is to always visit the discussion forum for this course, if not you might miss out on critical information.

#4 Final examination
My Prof once mentioned, “This course is quite easy, except for the project.” Hmmmm… Not exactly true, but not a lie as well. Yes, the concepts in the course are relatively easy to pick up since a huge chunk of the course is on SAP S4/HANA. The rest is just about business process reengineering, flowcharts, control issues, robotic process automation (RPA), and UiPath. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to be diligent. I would say that you should still take notes for this course since the finals is open book. Do also attempt the past year papers since most questions are structured in the same way. Flowchart drawing requires a lot of practice because there are bits and pieces of information that you wouldn’t know about unless you put pen to paper yourself. Also, the paper that I sat for this semester actually had a surprise element to it. The past 2 sems had MCQs on RPA but for this paper, there wasn’t. Given this sudden change, I’m not so sure whether future semesters will have MCQs on RPA as well. The Profs might have decided to switch things up because most students usually score extremely well for the MCQs. Lastly, not too sure whether this is important but during my exam, quite a few students actually left early haha.

If you are still reading this, congratulations! You just managed to read 1,781 words. If you were able to comprehend the big chunk of words above, AC2401 will be a breeze for you haha. Anyway, I hope that my review helps you out! All the best!