Transactions

Transactions are events which need to be recorded with the production, sale and distribution of goods and services. Examples include:

• Buying an item in a store
• Paying a gas bill
• Taking out a library book
• Applying for a driving licence
• Enrolling on a college course
• Applying for a University place
• Notifying a new employer of your full name, address and bank account details
• Clocking in and out from work

It should be fairly obvious that the number of transactions that occur in Britain every day is very much bigger than the population. All of the data that is gathered in this way has to be captured by a computer. Many of these processes the input of information has been partly automated. Swipe and smart cards reduce the number of cheques and the amount of cash handled for example but often the shop still write the price by hand and a piece of paper has to be processed somewhere. The location of the input has changed in other cases. For example electricity and gas meter readers type the values into a hand held device.

Several different ways of processing these transactions have occurred. The oldest is batch processing, but increasingly we see examples of interactive or even real time processing. The next few pages explain how these work.

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