The Future of Accounting: How Will Digital Transformation Impact the Sector?

Abstract

The growing dissemination of digital technologies has had an incomparable impact on many dimensions of today’s civilisation. Digital transformation (DT) redefined the industrial structures and reinvented business models. Hence, in the face of Industry 4.0, financial and accounting services face new threats, challenges, and opportunities. How do the business players in the accounting sector perceive this phenomenon? This paper aims to answer this question by following a qualitative and exploratory approach, applied to three case studies, using semi-structured interviews. The study shows that although digital transformation in Portuguese small and medium-sized accounting service enterprises is just starting, Industry 4.0 technologies, optical character recognition (OCR), artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and enterprise resource planning (ERP) in the cloud were the technologies singled out by respondents. Resistance to change, organisational culture and price seem to be the main barriers to DT in accounting. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the role of accounting and accountants in organisations and society in the context of the digital era. Moreover, it provides practical insights into the potential relationship between technological (specifically digital) development and labour market dynamics for accounting professionals.

Research on Management Accounting Framework and Quantitative Correlation Based on Hall Three-Dimensional Structure

“…e enterprise operation control and management accounting tools will be deeply integrated and unified driven by information technology in the future with the application of intelligent finance. e management accounting framework based on big data and intelligent finance will also become the field of future research [29].…”

An Empirical Framework for Assessing the Balanced Scorecard Impact on Sustainable Development in Healthcare Performance Measurement

“…The level of implementation of digital technologies defines the level of digital transformation (DT) of activities and significantly affects the decision-making process by increasing the speed of decision-making and reducing errors [ 42 , 43 ]. In addition, many organizations integrate new digital technologies into the accounting information system used by managerial accounting [ 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 ]. Therefore, accounting management tools know an increasingly accelerated digital transformation [ 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 ].…”

Assessing Artificial Intelligence Technology Acceptance in Managerial Accounting

“…The impact of implementing artificial intelligence in managerial accounting (AIMA), given the opportunities offered by technologies such as distributed registers (blockchain), big data, and open cloud is still unclear, given the early stage of using these technologies in MA. One issue that many researchers [2][3][4][5][6] agree on concerns the automation and facilitation of large-scale decision making. The multiplicity of information generates an increase in complexity [7].…”