The Future Of Blockchain In Accountancy

As discussed in Section 5.1, most papers on the changing role of accountants are normative. They talk mainly about various assumptions over how blockchain may influence accounting. One of the main changes frequently discussed is how blockchain will change the way accountants collect information. Given this, we think the future will result in more case studies and practically-oriented papers that empirically test blockchain’s impact on accounting (Alles, 2018). According to Zhang et al. (2017), new business reporting models, such as triple-entry accounting, will demand investigations into how blockchain strengthens or alters functions like valuations and contracting.

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1. We used a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, which is well-suited to providing a systematic and non-biased method of investigating a body of literature (Cai et al., 2019; El-Haj et al., 2019; Black et al., 2020; Bentley et al., 2018; Fligstein et al., 2017).
2. The parts of accounting concerned with transactional assurance and carrying out transfer of property rights will be transformed by blockchain and smart contract approaches.
3. Moreover, as highlighted in the Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting, the principles of prudence, neutrality and conservatism continue to pose challenges for properly presenting cryptoassets in financial statements (FRC, 2018; The Interpretations Committee, 2019).
4. Additionally, blockchain provides opportunities to collect qualitative social and environmental data, which will continue to require assurance in the future.
5. A well-developed regulatory framework may help tokens become a legitimate means of exchange in ecosystems that will start growing in the future.

Due to distributed ledger technology, blockchain technology eliminates the need for entering accounting information into multiple databases and potentially removes the need for auditors to reconcile disparate ledgers. This could save substantial amounts of time and the risk of human error may be considerably reduced. Broadly speaking, financial systems—especially accounting systems—are being pushed from the physical world to the digital world. To some, blockchain represents a “movement” rather than a technology and describes migration to blockchain technology as a form of risk mitigation to avoid technological obsolescence. To others, blockchain technology is essentially about reducing information risk and providing trust regarding accounting data.

The adoption of blockchain technology along with artificial intelligence technologies and, more specifically, machine learning is happening at a fast rate. Blockchain technology reduces the possibility of disputes by fraudsters and scams. This reduces risks for all parties who use blockchain technology for accounting purposes. It also saves businesses a lot of time from having to deal with fraud or trying to collect money from dishonest organizations. Blockchain in accounting will help accountancy firms and accounting professionals, particularly auditors, with business audits. Since a large part of audits is verifying the occurrence and accuracy of financial records, this would free up a lot of time for the accounting professional to focus on other things.

Researchers should test new business models in a market and evaluate transaction efficiency and the degree of novelty in the transaction’s content, structure, steering, resource use, network effects and value creation for stakeholders. Researchers can analyse the efficiency of blockchain implementation in different areas and focus on “the benefits of the first-mover advantage” (Karajovic et al., 2019, p. 322). In the future, it will be important to monitor the progress of the implementation of blockchain in different types of organisations (Gietzmann and Grossetti, 2019). Even if you’re not using cryptocurrency, blockchain accounting can involve US dollars and other assets. Plus, understanding the basics of blockchain will help you follow future updates and be more prepared. Then when the time comes that blockchain technology directly impacts your business, you’ll be ready.

2 Defining a set of articles for further analysis

One related research question for the future involves whether blockchain-based instant tax allocation helps to decrease the cost of tax compliance for companies or not (Karajovic et al., 2019). Blockchains do not provide a guarantee for transactions taking place in the real world. Even if they are recorded onto blockchains, transactions may still be fraudulent, illegal or unauthorised.

Membership regulations

The divergence of crypto classifications means that worldwide regulation and availability of information on cryptoassets will be the most important factors for their spread. As a result, we see the need for a proactive regulatory framework rather than merely reacting to questions regarding the regulation and accountability of cryptoassets. Because blockchain eliminates the need to enter and reconcile information in multiple databases, efficiency gains are a key strength. Blockchain also saves time by increasing the speed of transactions, reducing human error and minimising fraud (Kokina et al., 2017; O’Leary, 2017).

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Lev and Gu (2016) argue that blockchain may reduce information asymmetry and lead to more nonrecurring items definition effective decision-making. Anyone could aggregate the firm’s transactions into the form of an income statement and balance sheet at any time, and they would no longer need to rely on quarterly financial statements prepared by the firm. The LDA analysis unearthed ten topics, which we needed to find appropriate names for.