Hardware used in my created system - inputs and outputs

My system can be described as a number of subsystems. The wage slip is a system in itself, having the spreadsheet as input data and storage, the actual mail merge being the process then the wage slip being your output. But deeper down, the spreadsheet alone is a system, with data entered in as input, the cells storing the data. Then the processes are the formulas manipulating the data, finally giving us wage figures as our outputs from the spreadsheet sub-system.

The problem with the hardware I am using is that with a keyboard and mouse, lots of errors can be made, even with validation rules. Someone may type a 7 in hours instead of 8 and then that employee would get underpaid. A better system would be to use a card scanner, fingerprint scanner or barcode scanner with recognition of each employee’s card/fingerprint. A person could scan in when they enter the work place and then rescan back out and then the data of how many hours they had worked could automatically enter into the spreadsheet, therefore making error almost impossible. The problem with this is that there is a larger initial cost for the technology needed over a mouse and keyboard input.

There are also completely different systems like using pen and paper… The upside of this is that it’s extremely cheap as no expensive hardware or software is needed. There are many downsides to this system though. First of all, it is very slow, as each wage slip must be written out individually and all calculations have to be done by hand and then written down. Furthermore, lots of errors can be made using pen and paper because the calculations aren’t as consistent as using some kind of computer. Hand writing may be misread on the calculations and then it could make catastrophic mistakes when copying out the calculation results onto the wage slip.  Writing each wage slip out would take so much time that it probably wouldn’t even be feasible in this day and age. Automated wage slips overcome this problem

Commercial systems are normally very accurate but they’re made for very large scale operations, and so cost a lot of money. Also, our system uses very basic hardware that any computer will have, and can be adapted to the user’s needs.