UCD Teaches its Students Business Processes and Financial Management on AccountsIQ
UCD is the largest university in Ireland with 30,000 students and 5,000 staff. UCD uses AccountsIQ’s cloud accounting platform to teach their commerce undergraduates business processes and financial management.
The Challenge
UCD needed a reliable, robust and secure cloud accounting module to allow students to login for tutorials and to enable a secure and tailored session for up to 150 students to work simultaneously on the tutorials. The student cohort of 520 is split into 11 groups of 50 each with sometimes three of the groups overlapping and needing to work in parallel in three different lecture rooms.
As AccountsIQ is cloud-based, it meant that UCD required no local infrastructure and minimal set up, which is a real advantage given that over 520 students each year need to access the software, each using their own laptops. With AccountsIQ no hardware or servers are required and the system can be accessed through a standard web browser, with minimal support required from the University.
It was also a fundamental requirement of the system, that the students can learn, take an exam and have their work graded. Added to that, the platform had to be reliable and robust, so that the students can complete their work without any problems, down-time or rescheduling.
The Solution
AccountsIQ designed a solution to fit UCD’s needs creating a version of the software that would enable students to learn and be tested. The University can set tutorials and reset all companies used for each tutorial to a starting position afterwards. Each year the AccountsIQ system is cleared of data and re-supplied to UCD for the fresh intake of students. In the five years that UCD has been using AccountsIQ over 3,000 students have been trained on the platform.
UCD’s IT lecturer Linden Lee says:
AccountsIQ is more logically set out than some other systems, its features are easy to grasp and students can see quite clearly the progression through various business processes such as the expenditure and revenue cycles. It’s intuitive and well thought-out.
AccountsIQ is easy to use for both lecturers and students. Each student is required to take a series of four tutorials which culminates in a 3 hour exam. The student learns the flow through all business processes and has to set up debtors, creditors, push through orders, and then produce a stock pdf, which then tests if the student has entered the correct information. This set up enables students’ performance to be easily assessed.
As Linden explains, “With AccountsIQ it is easy to get the idea of what they’re doing and why. It’s very easy for the student to visualise the process and it gives them confidence that they’re doing the right thing.”
Linden continues: “We’ve been using AccountsIQ for five years now and thousands of students have used the system and been tested on it. It’s great for teaching as we can set exams with literally no set up required. Students can follow it easily and we can see clearly how each student has performed. Batch files are set up each time and it’s a proven method that simply works.”