What Digital Technologies are Used Today by Accounting Firms to Deliver Services

Abstract

Abstract Nowadays for carrying out their activity, enterprises rely a lot on information and communication technology. In a dynamic business environment characterized by many uncertainties, the accuracy and speed of information production are crucial. Internal and external accountants prepare the information needed by managers to make decisions. Advances made in information and communication technology ensure near real-time information and instant communication. This paper investigates digital technologies used today by accounting firms to deliver services considering the driving factors for adoption and the impact of their use. We mobilized institutional theory as a theoretical framework, accounting services industry from Romania as context and semi-structured interviews as research methods involving 17 accounting experts. The results indicated that adoption of digital technologies within accounting firms is mainly driven by coercive and mimetic isomorphic pressures coming from the state and competitors. International and local accounting firms affiliated to international networks implemented digital technologies to a greater extent compared to local independent accounting firms which intend to invest more in digital technologies when the electronic invoicing system becomes mandatory for all enterprises. For clients with a large amount of data, accounting firms use import interfaces to exchange data between information systems. Cloud applications and virtual meeting platforms enable the provision of digital services and today because of digital technologies large companies can also outsource their accounting services. Some accounting firms are required by contract to use digital technologies provided by their clients. Accounting experts claimed that automation solutions decrease the processing time of documents and ensure a similar quality to the manual work performed by human employees. Showing what digital technologies are used today and their impact for accounting services industry represent the main contributions of our study. Our research has implications for smaller accounting firms since our findings can represent for them an important source of information.