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What factors influence the intention to adopt blockchain technology in accounting education?
It can also assist doctors with preliminary diagnoses of conditions such as skin cancers and help hospitals reduce wait times. If an organization modifies a transaction’s data in the blockchain, it’ll affect the hash value. Blockchain’s immutable nature comes from the fact that once a public consensus validates a transaction into the blockchain, it’s virtually impossible to alter or delete the transaction. There are three key aspects of blockchain that can affect the accounting industry. Inside each block header, the Merkle root represents a summary of all the transactions included in the block in the form of a hash. To create the Merkle root, hashes of two records are hashed together to produce a hash of the combination, and then the process is repeated moving up the tree until all the records in the block are represented in one hash.
- The research findings revealed that big data technology could enhance the effectiveness of enterprise financial accounting information management.
- The dilemma of adopting blockchain in accounting and auditing is in finding the right trade-off between information confidentiality and transparency.
- When individuals perceive a technology as easy to use, they tend to believe it would be beneficial for their tasks (Fathema et al. 2015).
- Therefore, our contribution joins two methodological approaches in this field, starting from the research of Dal Mas et al. (2019), Dumay and Cai (2014), Massaro et al. (2016) and Secinaro et al. (2020).
What is Blockchain Accounting? A Primer for Small Businesses
Valerio Brescia is a researcher at the Department of Management at the University of Turin. PhD in Business and Management at the same university, his main research interest deals with the consolidated financial statements of the municipality, accounting standards and popular financial reporting. He holds a master’s degree in Economic Sciences ‐ Firms Administration and Control at the School of Management and Economics in Turin with full marks. He also has a master’s in management of local health facilities and hospitals from the University of Turin. In recent years, he is particularly interested in new technologies and their role in accounting and auditing. The first focuses on blockchain and its technological features strictly related to decentralized platforms, such as Ethereum, used to share peer-to-peer smart contracts.
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They collected data through questionnaire surveys and applied statistical analysis methods for data processing. The findings indicate that blockchain technology could enhance a company’s operational capabilities, fostering business innovation and efficiency improvements. Haddara et al. (2021) [12] investigated the potential synergy between enterprise systems and blockchain technology, highlighting its transformative impact on enterprise systems and the enhancement of information sharing and security.
Furthermore, accountants with blockchain experience can serve as consultants by helping their clients navigate both implementation and regulatory issues related to blockchain technology. Contrary to what may be supposed of tech erasing opportunities, the automation of auditing allows for bookkeepers and accounting professionals to increase their advisory services to interpret results and train clients. It ensures that transactions are recorded accurately in real-time, reduces the chances of errors, fraud, and data manipulation, and enables seamless auditing and compliance processes. Additionally, the decentralised nature of Blockchain Accounting promotes trust among participants, as they all have access to the same source of truth. As the demands and expectations for more of this information continue to increase, accountants well versed in blockchain will be well positioned to elevate their role. Securing, protecting, and analyzing the multiple streams of information already produced by organizations represents an entirely new field of opportunity for us.
Third, in terms of concepts analyzed, we find that the focus in management and control of the sources mainly involved accounting and auditing. More specifically, accounting and auditing reveal the different views of authors such as Coyne and McMickle (2017) and Dai and Vasarhelyi (2017), who are pioneering authors in this area. By contrast, accountability and blockchain are even younger than the entire research stream. Thus, few authors have demonstrated the role of blockchain in sharing both financial and environmental data.
We followed this advice, applying a hybrid approach that comprised LDA analysis, citation analysis and a manual review. Fig 3 demonstrates that TESM exhibits lower information-sharing efficiency, and as the number of iterations increases, the improvement in information-sharing efficiency is relatively modest. This phenomenon may stem from TESM’s failure to account for the non-linearity and randomness in financial data, resulting in less accurate and stable predictive results. NPSM exhibits higher information-sharing efficiency, and the increase in efficiency becomes more notable with an uptick in the number of iterations. This enhancement may be attributed to NPSM’s ability to adapt to the non-linearity and randomness inherent in financial data, thereby improving the accuracy and robustness of predictive results. In conclusion, the BFSA model stands out with the best performance, effectively achieving financial accounting information sharing and transmission.
Besides, there is evidence that consensus in accounting has a positive correlation with the accuracy of decisions (Ashton, 1985). The blockchain features show that both cryptography and the hashing process are two elements of protection and assurance concerning the consensus mechanism. Finally, private blockchain structures are investigated in 11% of documents, primarily involving supply chain cases.
Moreover, this Accounting system operates on a consensus mechanism, wherein network participants must collectively agree on the validity of transactions before they are added to the ledger. This consensus process ensures the accuracy of data and prevents fraudulent activities. It understanding drivers has some specific principles, such as immutability, meaning it can’t be modified or deleted once you create a record. It also has certain principles around transparency, such as anybody can examine a public transaction from a blockchain such as Bitcoin, Aetherium, and others.
In this study, PU, ATU, and OS (Fig. 2; Table 4) explained approximately 64% of the variance in “BIB.” To assess Q², the Stone-Geisser approach was employed using blindfolding techniques. As shown in Table 5, the Q² scores are above zero, confirming https://www.simple-accounting.org/points-lines-and-curves/ the predictive significance of the research model. B) Following the examination of the measurement model, the study proceeded to estimate the structural model to assess the relationships between latent constructs and test the hypotheses.
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Some research products have used general frameworks such as the technology–organization–environment framework (Dai and Vasarhelyi, 2017) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (Ferri et al., 2020). Many others do not refer to a theoretical framework in their analysis of this phenomenon because they provide general overviews of the possible uses, benefits and limitations of blockchain in the context of accounting (Pimentel and Boulianne, 2020). Wang and Kogan (2018) extend the aim of Dai and Vasarhelyi (2017) to solve the trade-off between confidentiality and transparency and propose the use of zk-SNARK (zero-knowledge verification) schemes and homomorphic encryption. In this way, the data stored in a blockchain can be validated and summed without revealing any details.
Similarly, Bonsón and Bednárová (2019, p. 737) conclude that “blockchain is an under-explored phenomenon, [and] future research is necessary to obtain a full understanding of this emerging technology and its implications for the accounting and auditing sphere”. As an increasingly prominent and innovative tool, blockchain technology has found widespread application in diverse fields such as finance, supply chain management, and smart contracts [1–3]. Among these applications, enterprise financial accounting information sharing stands out as a crucial form of collaboration, playing a pivotal role in facilitating information flow and enhancing inter-enterprise operational efficiency. The introduction of distributed ledgertechnology, or what is known as blockchaintechnology, has challenged current methodsof doing business. Ifthe adoption of new technologies such as blockchainchanges the process of conducting transactions,accountants and auditors should understand thechanges to correctly reflect them in their work.
Some authors call for the appearance of a new brand of auditor that can offer attestation services for independent evaluations of blockchain controls (Canelón et al., 2019; Sheldon, 2019). The long-term implementation of blockchain technology has the potential to consistently enhance financial transparency for enterprises, as each transaction is immutably recorded on the blockchain. This is positive for investors, regulatory bodies, and stakeholders, fostering trust and improving market transparency. Furthermore, the sustained implementation of blockchain technology may promote closer collaboration among enterprises, particularly in the realm of financial information sharing. Cross-enterprise information sharing can lead to more efficient supply chain management, shared risk, and strengthened trust relationships among business partners.
Therefore, we adopt Massaro et al.’s (2016) model to increase the reliability of the representation of the results. The subsequent paragraphs explain the dataset creation, the tools used to implement the analysis and how the open codes were created. Make sure you’re ready for the changes that digital technologies are bringing to finance functions and accountancy work. Complete eLearning, watch webinars and read bite-sized summaries on the opportunities and challenges brought by automation, artificial intelligence and big data. Accountants can also work as advisers to companies considering joining blockchains themselves, providing advice on weighing the costs and advantages of the new system. Accountants’ mix of business and financial nous will position them as key advisers to companies approaching these new technologies looking for opportunity.