RAILWAY ACCOUNTS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 86, 11 April 1922, Page 5

RAILWAY ACCOUNTS.

MECHANICS IN BOOKKEEPING.

A REMARKABLE STSTEM. ESTABLISHED IX XEW ZEALAXD. {Special to ''Star.'') WELLIXGTOX, this day. When the newspaper reader finds from his daily paper tf_.t the Railway • Department's "revenue for eleven months '- has amounted —as shown by this week's " returns—to .€0.1:18.41*? 9/6. he pro- " bably gives no thought to the methods s by which every item, great and small, ill the trading of the railways has been f brought to account in this total of mil- • lions. To merely count up the aeeumu- " lated transactions until they run into 1 millions is an important arithmetical - task, but much more is involved in a • concern which has to set-Ore thorough s checks on the whole of the sums re- ' eeived from the public. This is the ' work of the Railway Audit Department, l _ and since last August it has brought to its aid a wonderful set of machines which have reduced the "spade-work" of bookkeeping to almost the simple performance of a mechanical task. Instead of skilled accountants, the bulk of the "spade-work" in its accountancy . system is done by girls, who probably know nothing about the intricacies of accountancy, though they arc __f curate typistes. ' The Xew Zealand Railways Department is the first railway concern south of the Line to instal for its accountancy work the Powers sorting and tabulating '. machines. They have been tried by it long enough to make it clear that not , only do the machines simplify the work, I but through their agency a mass of ( important information regarding the nature of traffic aud the money returns . can be secured mechanically, and with , absolute accuracy, for all calculations are done by a machine. < I AUDIT BY MACHIXERV. ; When a customer of the Department consigns goods at n station, he in effect buys a certain amount of° transport service from the Department. He may ' pay for it immediately, or ho may ■ require the receiver to pay. in -which case the transaction is called "To pay." An Auckland merchant may buy, say, ,C(5 worth of transport to Wellington on the "To pay"' basis. Aucklano records this transaction, and it becomes necessary to ascertain eventually [' whether the Wellington staff has duly collected that i-(i. If it was one trans- ... action the matter could be quickly , j cleared up. but on the Xew Zealand . | railways there are about four thousand jof thes.e purchases of transport every day. and the stations involved number many hundreds. Auckland, for in- , stance, would put through four hundred separate goods transactions daily, to possibly different stations. It has an inward business equally large, so that possibly 200 stations have sold . transport to Auckland. Their accounts 1 show charges which Auckland must collect, and it is a matter for the accoun- ■- tants to see that these debits are eventtially turned into credits in the bank. To check the whole process involves p . making out a statement showing the accumulated transactions of each sta*j tion. based, not only on its own returns, but- for purposes of'a check —on the returns in respect to its business shown '' in the books of all other stations doing - business with it. This is the work of • "abstracting," a tedious business jiorp mally involving the preparation of - schedules of all the transactions classiJ fied under the headings of stations. For large centres two clerks were continur ally employed in abstracting, while at the smaller stations the task involved ? the burning of much midnight oil by » the station-master or his clerks. Xow machinery has i-ome into this work, and 1 it is all concentrated in Wellington, i where a small staff, principally of girls. does the whole of the "abstracting"' for the system, and easily keeps up with the work ;n daylight hours. The consignment of each lot of goods involves the preparation of a waybill, ? which, by means oi carbon paper, is made out in triplicate in the one opera- ? tion. One copy goes with the goods, another is sent, direct to the receiving 1 station, and the third is tne permanent • record of the transaction which goes J with all other similar waybills to Wellington. Each day's collection of waybills from a station is summarised in a return, and forwarded to Wellington " with the set- of waybills attached. A ' girl at the Powers machine then copies if the items from the waybills, but the 1 result is shown not in typewriting, but in holes punched on an oblong card carrying columns of figures relating to • weights, money, the nature of the payment, and the sending and receiving stations, each of which have their distinctive number. The set of punched cards is put through the Powers tabulating machine, which, at a rapid pace, prints off the whole of the items, and gives a total which serves as a check on the human calculation of the balance. As these waybills relate to a large number of .station*, they have to be sorted in station order, so that the transactions . of all stations are brought together. This is done quite automatically by a j sorting machine, which, working on the _ punched cards, shows an uncanny . capacity for turning all the Xo. 20 " station transaction into the box of that " number. Th* tabulating machine takes j the batch of Xo. 20 cards, and in a few' . moments has a correctly totalled • record of the whole. It is then a matter ' for comparison between abstracts from . different stations, to cheek off the tran- , sactionr, of anyone by the abstract furnished by all other stations which have done tnisineFs with it. AXALYSINT, THE BUSINESS. Railway operating is so large a busi--1 ness that to keep count of its many r phases involves an enormous amount of - clerical labour. Xew Zealand's railway i transactions for the year are only - flhown under seven heads, six classes of ' goods, and the passenger traffic. Under \ the manual system of accounts, this was i about the limit of analysis possible at i reasonable expense, but the particulars j punched on the waybill cards by the t girls enable these cards, when sorted t through the sorting machine in "com- ? modify"' order, to produce quite auto--1 math-ally the totals in weight and j money involved in the carrying of varii ous classes of traffic. The old statisr tical system gave no clue to the general - public, or to Parliament. rVrarding the extent of concession involved in carrying - lime free for farmers, or of any other 3 special facility provided under the -•policy of running the railways, not so ; much for a visible cash profit as for the .development of the Dominion. However, -jthe installation of these wonderful' t mechanical aids to accountancy will at j i once enable the department to take out - national figures relating to 46 classes of traffic instead of only seven. I