Question

Restaurant Products Company (RPC) has been an audit client of your firm for many years. RPC has a March 31 fiscal year end. The company is a successful distributor of restaurant and food industry products, such as trays, weigh scales, dishes, cooking implements. The company sells to businesses only (i.e. not to end consumers), with clients ranging from small restaurants to large food service chains and hotels. The company does have a perpetual inventory system, but the current inventory system relies upon accurate data entry of receipts, shipments and inventory adjustments from paper documents.

RPC is looking to improve inventory management and maintain costs in the face of rising competition and growth. Accordingly, it is implementing RFID (radio frequency identification) technology for its inventory in January 2012. RFID chips will be placed on warehouse shelf locations, boxes of products, and on large cost individual products. At the same time the company will implement a wireless mesh system throughout the warehouse, with wireless tracking of product movement. Effective January 31, 2012 a new inventory management system is being implemented to facilitate better decision making and access to online realtime inventory data. The new inventory management system will include a new database that will include internal records of inventory on hand, receipts and shipments of inventory, purchase order details, and payment details.

Required:

A. For each phase of the financial statement audit process, describe the phase, and explain how the audit process is affected or changed due to the implementation of the new database management system.

B. What is the impact of the implementation of RFID on the financial statement audit process?

[Note that these points must be different from those raised in Part A above.]

Answer

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