COUNTING IN MILLIONS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20895, 26 November 1937, Page 15

COUNTING IN MILLIONS

HOW IT IS DONE AT THE G.P.O.

MARVELS OF THE MACHINE

The annual report of the PostmasterGeneral discloses that the great State Department which he controls carried out cash transactions last year to the value of £236,000,000. The Post Office is an Important collecting and paying 'agent for other Government departments, and its own business involves receipts and payments closely reaching 4 millions.

When any Important phase of Post Office business is examined for its details, the million figure becomes frequent. Savings Bank deposits have reached 58 millions, the toll calls last year number over 13 millions, telegrams totalled over 5 millions and the money orders issued were valued at £3,688,000. On the postal side, the figures of letters and other postal packets handled run into the hundreds of millions. How are these monumental masses of figures dealt with in the exact manner required where cash is Involved? Operations are on so immense a scale that the old manual method of accountancy has to be replaced at the General Post Office by the British-made Powers machines. Human agency is still necessary to provide the calculating machines with their material, because the cards used for the mechanical method of accountancy have to be prepared from thousands of written statements forwarded from all the Department’s offices.

The statistics needed in a great Department conducted on commercial lines, with its capital expenditure subject to efficient costing analysis, could not be obtained by the old-fashioned method because results could not be reached until they had become quite out of date. The Department’s engineering branch, for instance, is carrying out extensive works, all estimated for in advance and subject to close scrutiny at frequent intervals. Every item of expenditure either for wages or materials is entered on the appropriate document, which reaches the Finance Branch of the G.P.O. where all the details are recorded on small oblong cards. This initial process involves the use of machines with a group of figure-keys which can be covered by the operator’s right hand. In actual work, the operator rarely looks at the keys, but uses the “touch” system and concentrates attention on the document under action. Its information is translated into punched holes on the card, and the whole secret of accurate machine accountancy depends on their exactness of position. Many different varieties of printed arrangements appear on these cards, according to the information they are to record, but the card Itself never varies in size. The information having been translated into the raw material for the tabulating machine, the card goes to another operator who, examining the original document once more, again depresses the right keys, and If the original record Is correct the card passes out to the sorting and tabulating machine. However, if the information recorded by the check operator does not agree with . that punched on the card, the check machine stops, and the error is immediately detected.

It is in its capacity to rapidly analyse many phases of accounts that the value of the machine accountancy system is outstanding. To recall the engineering data which has been previously mentioned. It contains a job number, which always appears on any relevant accounting document. There may be thousands during the course of a long enterprise, but the punching machine has made a hole In the position on the card which will enable all cards relating to that work to be brought together at the rate of nearly 25,000 an hour. Then, in the large electrical tabulating machine, the individual items can be calculated at the rate of nearly 3000 per hour, and a total obtained at any stage of the process. The punching of a record card of these totals enables the financial history of the transaction to be brought up to date in a few moments.

The sorting machine Is the key to the remarkably effective use of the tabulating machine. It might be necessary to quickly ascertain the cost of only one phase of all the Department’s capital undertakings. There may be thousands of card records, carrying the details of all phases of many jobs, but if, for instance, labour cost only has to be ascertained, the setting of the sorter, a simple process taking a few seconds, will enable thousands of records of scores of jobs to be all sorted together, ready for the tabulator to print off the individual details of labour cost, and the totals which the Department requires. Money-order business is transacted at nearly a thousand post offices, and (Continued in previous column.)