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ACCA Applied Knowledge · Management Accounting · Accounting for management

A retail company records each individual till transaction, showing item code, quantity and price. A manager receives a weekly report showing total sales value by product category, which she uses to decide which categories to promote. In terms of the data-information relationship, what is the weekly report?

The weekly report is information. The individual till transactions are raw data, and once they are summarised into sales totals by category and made relevant to a promotion decision, they become information that has been processed to have meaning and purpose.

  1. ARaw data, because it is derived from till transactions
  2. BInformation, because the transaction data has been processed into a form useful for a decisionCorrect
  3. CKnowledge, because it is used by a manager
  4. DData, because it consists of numbers

Explanation

Data are raw facts with no context. When till transactions are processed and summarised into category totals that help a manager decide, the output is information. The report is not raw data because it has been processed and given meaning.

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