An example of information overload in accounting information systems would be:
Generating massive amounts of reports, invoices, financial statements, audit trails, journal entries, etc. that provide far too much detail and information for the needs of the users. This results in users being overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of information, making it difficult to find relevant details or gain meaningful insights.
Other issues that can lead to information overload in accounting systems include:
• Generating reports with too many columns, rows, details that obscure key metrics.
• Lack of summarization - providing raw transaction-level details instead of aggregated summaries.
• Frequency of reporting - generating reports too frequently, e.g. daily or weekly, when monthly or quarterly would suffice for most users.
• Redundancy - providing the same information in multiple reports, formats and via different access points.
• Lack of tagging, classification and metadata - making information hard to organize, search and filter.
• Information dispersion - having information spread across different systems, databases and file formats.
• Lack of personalization - providing a "one-size-fits-all" set of standard reports and queries that do not meet specific user needs.
So in summary, information overload arises from providing too much irrelevant or unprocessed information for the useful work that accountants and other users need to accomplish.