Professional Application Case: Fluffy
Fluffy is a fast-growing company in North Dakota that creates, and ships customized stuffed animals to all fifty U.S. states. There are several options for customization, from customers submitting their own designs to sending the company a rough design idea that Fluffy then develops and creates. While business is going well, the company’s information system is a disaster, and they are not able to do any analytics. The priority is to integrate their data into an analytical database. They hire your firm to help them.
PAC 5.1 Auditing: Identify Data Issues
You are given access to Fluffy’s vendors, purchases, and employees files. Samples of the three files appear here.
- Using the data preparation patterns, review the sample data and identify at least three issues. Where applicable, specify which pattern you applied to detect and correct an issue.
PAC 5.2 Financial Accounting: Determine and Analyze Accounts Receivable
Fluffy allows their customers to pay in installments. In the current system, sales orders and payments are recorded in two separate files. The SalesOrders file records the amount the customer owes Fluffy and the payments that have been received. The CashReceipts file records all payments received. Samples of both files are shown here.
- Identify and explain the primary issue in the data set.
- Describe how you would reorganize the data to enable the calculation of accounts receivable.
PAC 5.4 Tax Accounting: Validate Sales Tax Amounts
Currently, Fluffy’s salespeople are responsible for creating and sending orders to customers. All salespeople have access to the Excel file that contains the sales tax rates for each state. They use that information to manually determine the sales tax of an order and enter it in the accounting system.
At the end of each week, Fluffy’s accounting system generates a list of all orders called Sales Orders. As Fluffy’s accountant, you must collect sales taxes and remit them to applicable states. You must check whether the sales tax amounts are accurate. A sample with ten orders from the sales orders file is shown next.
It would help if you could combine the information in both tables to automatically calculate the sales tax per order and compare the tax information by state. Are there any data issues that would prevent this? List the patterns you used to identify the issues.
