Accounting and Big Data: Trends, opportunities and direction for practitioners and researchers

By | 2023-02-09T22:24:24+01:00 February 9th, 2023|

Gianluca Gabrielli, Alice Medioli, Paolo Andrei / Financial Reporting / 2-2022

Big Data, the Internet of Things and Machine Learning are only today starting to be widely used but are already attracting interest. They can generate a significant impact on business management. This article analyses use and exploitation of Big Data by business management, focusing on its role in reshaping accounting information systems. The Internet of Things and Machine Learning play a key role in obtaining insights and value in this complex world. Like other areas of business, the accounting function is showing growing interest in their possible applications. We analyze, from three perspectives, how big data impacts on the accounting role in supporting managers and decision-making process, also with the aim to define future research lines that scholars could explore. An internal perspective focuses on how big data can impact management accounting; an external perspective focuses on a new dimension of financial accounting and disclosure of information; and a third perspective, the control one, focuses on the impact of big data on internal and external audit procedures.

 

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Integrated reporting and the epistemic authority of Big Data: An exploratory study from the banking industry

By | 2020-12-22T19:18:03+01:00 December 22nd, 2020|

Alice Francesca Sproviero  / Financial Reporting / 2-2020

This paper aims at exploring how corporate members involved in integrated re-port (IR) preparation assess the reliability of Big Data as a new source of information. It investigates IR preparation within a company operating in the Italian banking industry that has adopted Big Data since 2015. Using the epistemic authority lens (Kruglanski et al., 2005), this study reveals how corporate members draw mainly on their professional background and the Big Data-related initiatives to define the extent to which Big Data contributes to IR preparation, with educational background and corporate circumstances playing a less incisive part. Constructing performance indicators, identifying prospective information to contrast criminal phenomena and lending support to relational sustainability all act as in-formational and motivational factors that lead members to rely on Big Data while preparing the IR. The paper contributes to the infant literature on Big Data in corporate reporting by offering early practical insights into how Big Data informs IR preparation. It also provides evidence of a necessary intertwining between ac-counting-based knowledge and training initiatives on advanced analytics to fully exploit Big Data in IR preparation.

Insolvency, crisis, financial indicators, early warnings.

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