Use

Description

Planning

All businesses need to plan for the short, medium and long term.  Planning includes decision-making about staff, premises, equipment and customers.  Accurate and up to date information is required to enable planning to take place.

Recording

In order to have the necessary information for planning purposes, it must be collected in the first place.  Businesses collect a wealth of information as part of their normal operations.  They record details of purchases, sales, returns, deliveries etc.  Much of this is required to be collected by law - e.g. details of financial transactions.

Controlling

Once a business has made decisions and produced plans, it needs to regularly monitor progress against the plan.  Information is needed to help identify whether things are going better or worse than expected, and to spot ways in which corrective action can be taken

Measuring

A business must measure their performance in order to be successful.  They need to know for example, whether sales have improved since last year, whether customers on average are spending less than before.  Information is used as the main way of measuring performance. For example, this can be done by collecting and analysing information on sales, costs and profits

Decision-making

(1) Strategic information: used to help plan the objectives of the business as a whole and to measure how well those objectives are being achieved.

(2) Tactical Information: this is used to decide how the resources of the business should be employed.

(3) Operational Information: this information is used to make sure that specific operational tasks are carried out as planned/intended (i.e. things are done properly).