Effects of Technology on Accounting

The Effects of Technology on the Accounting Profession

ACC/340

Name

Date

Instructor

University of Phoenix

The Effects of Technology on the Accounting Profession

Accounting has always been a tedious job in the past with the majority of the work being very time consuming. Accountants have gone through many progressions throughout the years, each increasing the speed and efficiency of his or her work. From using paper and pencil writing ledgers, figuring totals through calculators, and crunching numbers using computers, technology has always played a role. Technology has had an impact on all areas of the business industry and the accounting profession has experienced the effects as much as any department.

There are a number of new technologies that have become available to accounting professionals to make the processes they do a bit easier. Computers, printers, scanners, and faxes are technologies that have help the general accounting processes. Spreadsheet programs, such as Microsoft Excel, can make reporting and calculations more accurate and efficient. Excel has become the normal for most accounting professionals due the fact that it reduces manipulation time and data input. Another technology being implemented is the use of interactive data and extensible business reporting language or XBRL. When using spreadsheets or other applications data is not always easily transferred from one to another so this is where the interactive data comes into the picture. Interactive data is data that can be reused and transferred seamlessly from one application or report to another (Bagranoff, 2008). A company’s total assets for example would need to be filed and calculated in different formats for the Securities and Exchange Commission, so to do this they would use interactive data. XBRL is becoming the standard language that performs these conversions. Tax preparation software is a technology that has also changed the accounting profession. Any...