The Foodservice Management Information System Essay Example for Free

The Foodservice Management Information System Essay The Foodservice Management Information System (FMIS V) sold by Genesistems, Inc. since 1980 on mini and super mini computers is now available on low cost personal computers and popular networks under FMIS V. According to Genesistems President Eric Muench, new programming languages have provided a method of allowing Genesistems proven FMIS system to operate with the same speed and flexibility on the new popular personal computers that was formerly available only on larger computers. This brings the cost of an automated solution for the foodservice operator down to a price that is affordable. The manager must be able to determine prices and schedules, make forecasts, perform an ongoing audit of inventory and other company assets, and monitor performance. More and more managers are turning to the computer to provide this information on a timely basis, he said. Traditionally, foodservice institutions have had weak in-house accounting systems based on tedious manual procedures, Muench continued. The result has been poor cost control. Food cost information is generally outdated before manual computations can even be completed. FMIS V solves these and other problems at a reasonable cost. FMIS V consists of the following modules: general ledger, accounts payable, payroll, bank reconciliation, inventory control, recipe control, sales analysis, and management report writing. Telecommunications input is available for certain cash registers. All modules are integrated and provide full accounting information automatically to the general ledger for up-to-date financial statements. The Foodservice Management Information System is available nationally from Genesistems, Inc. For more details on the Foodservice Management Information System, please contact us for more information. General Ledger The General Ledger module is the center of the accounting system. It is a powerful yet easy to use module that can accommodate a single unit restaurant as well as a large multiple unit operation. The General Ledger is automatically updated from all other modules being operated. Both 12 and 13 period accounting are supported. The Trial Balance Report and General Ledger Report provide the necessary documentation and audit trails required of a professional accounting system. Financial Statements can be designed to your specifications by you within the General Ledger module. The optional Management Report Writer gives you the added ability to print complex financial statements that consolidate or compare multiple time periods and units if necessary. Account budgets may be set up and used in forecasting and comparisons to actual activity. Accounts Payable The Accounts Payable module is designed to allow you to better manage your vendor invoices and payments. Inventory purchases that are entered will be automatically updated to the Inventory, Recipe, and Sales Analysis modules without any additional work. Invoices may be entered in summary, detail, or a combination of the two. By entering invoices, you are creating the capability of accumulating unpaid invoices easily at any time. A purchase history by vendor is also maintained, and check payment can be accomplished easily in a method that is convenient for your operation. This module lets you stay on top of your outstanding invoices so that invoices are never paid for twice. Payroll The Payroll module is designed for time entry, printing payroll checks, general ledger distribution and year-end W-2 forms. It can operate on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, or monthly basis with all input verified, copied, and employee records updated during the End-Pay-Period procedure. Other useful options are included such as payroll history inquiry, earnings summary report, employee payroll history, tip allocation, tip reporting and is integrated to the optional Federal Magnetic Media Reporting module. The module is easy to use due to its one-step nature. After set-up with a General Ledger file and initial data entry, payroll tracking becomes relatively easy. Time is entered, then the register is printed. If corrections are necessary, they can be made to the appropriate entries and the register re-printed. After everything balances, checks and reports are printed and then the pay period can be closed. This module is designed to operate in conjunction with other modules that may be installed. Programs are explained as if the General Ledger module were included. Information is transferred to all integrated modules as a function of the End-Pay-Period procedure or is transferred each month through the End-of-Month posting procedure. Bank Reconciliation The Bank Reconciliation module is used to manage your bank accounts. It is automatically updated as checks are written and deposits are entered. A simple method of canceling checks allows you to reconcile the account to the bank statement in very little time. Multiple bank accounts can be maintained simply and easily. A historical check register is maintained for up to five years for your review. Accurate, on demand financial statements tighten management control and eliminate monthly accounting fees. True, double entry accounting with forced balancing of entries eliminates costly posting errors. Comparisons of business units permit management to make intelligent analysis and take effective action. Reporting accommodates easy consolidation of multiple units or companies for corporate requirements. Simple invoice entry organizes and validates invoices for accuracy and automatically updates the Inventory module if necessary. Accounts Payable Cash Requirements Report provides immediate access to a list of currently due invoices and the total cash required. Controlled payment of Accounts Payable invoices eliminates duplicate payments, conserves cash, and accrues interest. Selection and printing of Accounts Payable computer checks saves time and eliminates errors. Bank Reconciliation provides an easy way to control and reconcile any bank accounts. Inventory Control The Inventory Control module is designed to allow you a fast and easy way to keep track of your inventory. You are able to track what you have purchased and what prices you are paying from various suppliers for any length of time. In-house batch production items can be processed along with multiple location transfers. Inventory is first categorized into major classifications that you choose such as meat, dairy and produce. Inventory can be kept on a perpetual basis by entering your purchases for those items and taking a physical count monthly or as frequently as desired to get your actual usage on each item. Inventory may also be kept on a periodic basis which does not require entering all your purchases. The periodic method allows for entry of a physical count and last cost at any point in time and will automatically extend the inventory for you. Both methods provide inventory count sheets by specific storage location and fast inventory count entry methods. The two methods can also be combined to allow detailed control of high cost items and less detailed control of less significant items. Recipe Control The Recipe Control module works hand in hand with the Inventory Control module. It provides you with an organized method of entering your recipes. You can take advantage of the ability to monitor your costs at all times before cost increases erode your profit margins. Unlimited levels of sub-recipes can be maintained very easily. Recipes can include a plate cost for items that you may not want to set up. Recipes can be costed in seconds at Last Cost or Average Cost and can be printed or displayed on the screen. Each recipe can also have detailed preparation instructions set up for use as a training manual. Quick, accurate food and beverage cost percentages can spot increasing costs before it is too late. What If capability for quick, profitable decisions on effect of price and cost changes to a menu or individual item. Easy, timely, accurate trend information on profit margins and popularity of menu items. Regular variance reporting on Actual versus Potential Inventory Usage flags items to watch for excessive use. Prompt, accurate comparisons of multi-unit sales for better management analysis and decisions. Server analysis tells you who is and who isnt selling items such as specials and desserts. Usage, waste and pilferage information is available at any time for management corrective action to maximize profits. Inventory Use and Purchase History allows more accurate inventory planning. Provides a clear, precise way of standardizing recipes for easier employee use. Inventory transfers between multiple units are tracked for proper allocation of charges and better management relations. Inventory Production allows the tracking of in-house prep items to show actual inventory usage and real costs. Friendly, flexible set up allows you to track only information you need and not data that you dont care about. Sales Analysis The Sales Analysis module completes the operations triangle. Both Inventory and Recipe Control are related heavily to Sales Analysis. Menu items are set up and defined at this point. A menu item can refer to a recipe or directly to an inventory item. Daily sales can be entered manually or transferred from a point of sale device if one is available. Sales history is maintained on a daily basis for any number of years. Entering your sales will generate your potential or optimal use of each inventory item and will give you an actual versus potential usage variance. Sales trends can be tracked in a wide variety of methods using the Management Report Writer. Sales Analysis gives you the capability to stay on top of your margins and control them before they can hurt you. Management Report Writing The Report Writer module allows the creation of custom reports wanted by individual companies. The flexibility and adaptability of this module allows for seemingly unlimited variations of report types. This module is limited only by your imagination. Thirty-six columns are available for mathematical and statistical computations (only limited by your printers capability). Data to be printed on these reports can be drawn from a variety of sources. The most common source is General Ledger and the Report Writer is particularly suited to producing complex financial statements. Reports can also be produced based on data from Sales Analysis or from the Statistics section of the Management Report Writer.

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The End of Prohibition Prohibition is the act of prohibiting or the condition of being prohibited. In other words prohibition is also the name of a law, order, or decree that forbids something. Basically what paves the way for prohibition of something, are its negative effects that may be dangerous for human beings on the whole. Hence, these are the negative effects of something that make the step of prohibiting a positive one. As a matter of fact, prohibition is the way to avoid further damages that may drive last nail in the coffin but sometimes prohibition appears as anathema to many people who regard the act of prohibiting a totally unjustified action. In our daily life, intentionally we prevent ourselves from doing such things that might be not good or suitable for us. Every day we come across such people who don’t like to smoke at all; on the other hand there are those people also who shudder to think how horrible their lives would be without cigarettes. There are many religious people for whom venomous sting of coral snake are better than using alcoholic beverages. In the same world there also those drinkers for whom a mere bottle of whiskey is the raison d'à ªtre thus each and every drop of liquor multiplies their life-span. But prohibition through a law or government act takes place when individual’s likes and dislikes can not put a stop to the government to pass such a law that is beneficial for the nation in the main. Prohibition law of America is one of those laws that appeared as a most contentious law in American history. Prohibition law is, in fact, the forbidding by law of the manufacture, transportation, sale, and possession of alcoholic beverages. If truth be told, Prohibition law is the extreme of the regulatory... ...ion in America: 1920-1933" ch 1 VOLSTEAD ACT, The Reader's Companion to American History http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_089600_volsteadact.htm Thorton, Mark. â€Å"Policy Analysis: Alcohol Prohibition Was a Failure.† July 17, 1991. Online. Netscape. 23 April 1998. U.S. v. Lanza, 260 U.S. 377 McWilliams, Peter. â€Å"Prohibition: A Lesson in the Futility (and Danger) of Prohibiting.† Online. Netscape. 23 April 1998. Catherine H. Poholek (1998) Prohibition in the 1920s, Thirteen Years That Damaged America, Bowen, Ezra, ed. This Fabulous Century. 6 vols. New York: Time Life Books, 1969. Wenburn, Neil. The USA: A Chronicle of Pictures. New York: Smithmark Publishers Inc., 1991. Behr, Edward. Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996. The Repeal of Prohibition, August 9, 2003, http://www.dpft.org/history.html

Critically Assess the View That Natural Law Is of No Use When Discussing Sexual Ethics Essay

I believe that natural law is of no use when discussing sexual ethics as it is very vague and doesn’t take into account specific situations. Natural Law says that everything has a purpose, and that mankind was made by God with a specific design or objective in mind. It says that this purpose can be known through reason. As a result, fulfilling the purpose of our design is the only ‘good’ for humans. The Primary Precepts of Natural Law require us to ‘live in an ordered society’ to ‘reproduce’, to ‘educate our young’, to ‘protect the innocent’ and the most important to ‘worship God’. The most relevant of these in this subject is reproduction, and if you look at it as a duty to continue the re-population of God’s people than of course sex can be understood as a good and moral action. In fact there are many biblic references to sex and Gods opinion on it, in Genesis He says; ‘be fruitful and increase in number’ and through-out it shows that sex is necessary. The problem for a Natural Law supporter comes when sex is only done as an ‘efficient’ cause, e. g. or pleasure and enjoyment, this is not following God’s final cause of re-production. Contraception is seen as immoral in Natural law and for most Catholics. If contraception is used it splits the ‘efficient’ practice of sex from the ‘final cause’ of reproduction; this goes against that actions purpose and makes it wrong as not what God intended. However some Natural Law supporters would argue that sex is not about what humans gain from it but what God actually intended it to be about, which could be unity and love etc. Other philosophers/philosophies who argue that this way of thinking about contraception and sex can lead to situations of unnecessary suffering. For example, a utilitarian approach would assess how pain and pleasure can be maximised in a situation and so would probably sharply contrast with Natural Law. Another thing to consider when thinking about natural law and contraception is that they don’t take into account third world countries, for example, and how not using contraception will lead to a spreading of aids and children the parents can’t afford to give a good life. Homosexuality is another sexual issue that Natural Law calls immoral for the same reason as contraception, because it doesn’t fill in sex’s final cause and reproduction and so homosexual sex cannot produce any children it is not ethical. The Catholic Church has long supported this view and have declared that homosexual orientation is not in itself immoral but just like the infertile couple sex without the possibility of children makes it wrong. However another thing to consider as part of the ‘living in an ordered society’ precept is not being judgmental of other people. Pre-marital sex could be seen as either good or bad by natural law followers as if the couple is reproducing and being good nurturing parents then they’re fulfilling most of the primary precepts and that is good. However they aren’t fulfilling the main one, worshiping God, as the bible teaches that sex should be saved for marriage, so a lot of natural law followers would say it is wrong. Something to consider in this is if they’re actually planning to get married at all? Does it still count as pre-marital? Extra marital sex is also a contentious issue for Natural Law followers. In a wedding ceremony promises are made before God ‘to love and to cherish’ and most importantly ‘forsaking all others’ to stay married until ‘death do us part’. As a vow before God, this cannot be broken and still be part of the primary precept ‘worship’ God. The ultimate aim of life is to be ‘united with God’ through our moral actions, as society where immorality and deception are accepted is not a place where God is being worshipped effectively. Sex should be about reproduction and families and therefore bringing you closer to God not a violation of a sacred vow. To conclude, I would argue that Natural law is an overly harsh method of making ethical decisions. It does not take into account the most loving action for people and nor does he make any exception for circumstance or what will benefit the majority of people.

Cyrus Field Promoter of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable

Cyrus Field was a wealthy merchant and investor who masterminded the  creation of the  transatlantic telegraph cable in the mid-1800s. Thanks to Fields persistence, news which had taken weeks to travel by ship from Europe to America could be transmitted within minutes. The laying of the cable across the Atlantic Ocean was an extremely difficult endeavor, and it was fraught with drama. The first attempt, in 1858, was celebrated exuberantly by the public when messages began to cross the ocean. And then, in a crushing disappointment, the cable went dead. A second attempt, which was delayed by financial problems and the outbreak of the Civil War, was not successful until 1866. But the second cable worked, and kept working, and the world got used to news traveling quickly across the Atlantic. Hailed as a hero, Field became wealthy from the operation of the cable. But his ventures into the stock market, coupled with an extravagant lifestyle, led him into financial problems. The later years of Fields life were known to be troubled. He was forced to sell most of his country estate. And when he died in 1892, family members interviewed by the New York Times took pains to say that rumors that he had become insane in the years before his death were untrue. Early Life Cyrus Field was born the son of a minister on November 30, 1819. He was educated to the age of 15, when he began working. With the help of an older brother, David Dudley Field, who was working as a lawyer in New York City, he obtained a clerkship in the retail store of A.T. Stewart, a famous New York merchant who essentially invented the department store. During three years of working for Stewart, Field tried to learn everything he could about business practices. He left Stewart and took a job as a salesman for a paper company in New England. The paper company failed and Field wound up in debt, a situation he vowed to overcome. Field went into business for himself as a way of paying off his debts, and he became very successful throughout the 1840s. On January 1, 1853, he retired from business, while still a young man. He bought a house on Gramercy Park in New York City, and seemed intent on living a life of recreation. After a trip to South America he returned to New York and happened to be introduced to Frederick Gisborne, who was trying to connect a telegraph line from New York City to St. Johns, Newfoundland. As St. Johns was the easternmost point of North America, a telegraph station there could receive the earliest news carried aboard ships from England, which could then be telegraphed to New York. Gisbornes plan would reduce the time it took for news to pass between London and New York to six days, which was considered very fast in the early 1850s. But Field began to wonder if a cable could be stretched across the vastness of the ocean and eliminate the need for ships to carry important news. The great obstacle  of establishing a telegraph connection with St. Johns was that Newfoundland is an island, and an underwater cable would  be required to  connect it to the mainland. Envisioning the Transatlantic Cable Field later recalled thinking about how that could be accomplished while looking at a globe he kept in his study. He began to think it would make sense to also place another cable, heading eastward from St. Johns, all the way to the west coast of Ireland. As he wasnt a scientist himself, he sought advice from two prominent figures, Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, and Lieutenant Matthew Maury of the U.S. Navy, who had recently conducted research mapping the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Both men took Fields questions seriously, and they answered in the affirmative: It was scientifically possible to reach across the Atlantic Ocean with an undersea telegraph cable.   The First Cable The next step was to create a business to undertake the project. And the first person Field contacted was Peter Cooper, the industrialist and inventor who happened to be his neighbor on Gramercy Park. Cooper was skeptical at first, but became convinced the cable might work. With Peter Coopers endorsement, other stockholders were enlisted and more than $1 million was raised. The newly formed company, with the title of the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, bought out Gisbornes Canadian charter, and began work on placing an underwater cable from the Canadian mainland to St. Johns. For several years Field had to overcome any number of obstacles, which ranged from technical to financial to governmental. He eventually was able to get the governments of the United States and Britain to cooperate and assign ships to help lay the proposed transatlantic cable. The first cable to cross the Atlantic Ocean became operational in the summer of 1858. Enormous celebrations of the event were held, but the cable stopped operating after only a few weeks. The problem seemed to be electrical, and Field resolved to try again with a more reliable system in place. The Second Cable The Civil War interrupted Fields plans, but in 1865 an attempt to place a second cable began. The effort was unsuccessful, but an improved cable was finally put in place in 1866. The enormous steamship Great Eastern, which had been a financial disaster as a passenger liner, was used to lay the cable. The second cable became operational in the summer of 1866. It proved to be reliable, and messages were soon passing between New York and London.   The success of the cable made Field a hero on both sides of the Atlantic. But bad business decisions following his great success helped tarnish his reputation  in the later decades of his life. Field became known as a big operator on Wall Street, and was associated with men considered robber barons, including Jay Gould and Russell Sage. He got into controversies over investments, and lost a great deal of money. He was never plunged into poverty, but in the last years of his life he was forced to sell off part of his large estate. When Field died on July 12, 1892, he was remembered as the man who had proven that communication was possible between continents.