Sally's Seaside Rentals: A Data Modeling Case

A considerable number of accounting information systems (AIS) courses (Premuroso, 2012) and textbooks (see, for example, Romney and Steinbart, 2012) include data modeling activities. These might include the Resources, Events, Agents (REA) model (Dunn and McCarthy, 1997; McCarthy, 1982), or more general modeling activities based on knowledge of normalized databases or Chen’s (1976) Entity-Relationship model. Frequently, these activities use case materials that involve only one transaction cycle because the models can become quite complex very quickly. This paper presents a case that includes elements of operations (also known as the production or conversion cycle) with cash receipts (an element of the revenue cycle) and cash disbursements (an element of the purchases cycle). This combination of elements of three cycles is unusual in a case that is not overly complex and is accessible to students who have had only a brief introduction to data modeling.