College concepts and applications

College/Accounting

Data Entry Errors

At eight dollars an hour, twenty hours of work would equal exactly one-hundred and sixty dollars. Since this is the amount of the error, I would assume that the data entry clerk made an error that resulted in my only being paid for one week of work, rather than two. It is impossible to know the exact nature of the error -- whether a key was mistakenly hit or information was misread, but it almost certainly involved the reduction of time worked by one week.

A more careful adherence to data validation techniques would ensure that such errors did not occur. Data validation is a fairly simple concept defined as "The checking of data for correctness, or the determination of compliance with applicable standards, rules, and conventions" (Answers.com). there are many different techniques for checking the validity of data, but not all of these are appropriate to all situations. In this instance, a simple presence check would be the best way to start. Just like it sounds, this is a check to ensure that all necessary data is accounted for, and that nothing has been missed out (the Teacher). It is possible that the two weeks of pay appeared on separate pages, and they almost certainly appeared on separate lines, and it is very likely that this was the clerical error that led to the mistake in pay.