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In many companies, the batch jobs would be scheduled on a timetable, for example 'end of day' and 'end of quarter' and could be initiated automatically by the Job Control Language or manually by the operator. The major benefit of batch processing is controlling the load placed on the computer by careful scheduling. For example, a long processor-intensive task would be timed to run over-night allowing for timesharing usage or short jobs during the day. When a batch job begins, processing will usually continue until it is completed unless there is an error but some mainframe machines could process multiple batched jobs concurrently.

Although the use of batch processing reduced with the move to personal computing and the drop in computing costs it is still used extensively by many large commercial businesses for back office tasks.

The opposite to batch processing is transaction processingIn computer science, a transaction is a group of logical operations that must all succeed or fail as a group. Systems dedicated to supporting such operations are known as transaction processing systems. As an example, consider a typical banking operation, and is not to be confused with DOSThe acronym DOS stands for disk operating system, a type of operating system for computers that provides the abstraction of a file system resident on hard disk or floppy disk secondary storage. DOS for IBM PC compatibles In particular, DOS refers to the f batch fileIn DOS and Windows, a batch file is a text file with a series of commands (see command line interface). When the batch file is run, the shell program ( command. exe) reads the file and executes its commands in order. A batch file is equivalent to a shells.