This article reflects about current and future role of Accounting Information Systems by analysing the main responsibilities of accountants and financial professionals. While several of these responsibilities are already suitably supported by traditional technology answers, others represent challenges that do still not have appropriate responses and therefore deserve to be the focus of future research. This work foresees future technological answers to Accounting domain challenges, like external and compliance reporting. The identified technologies include web services, mobile devices, cloud computing, environmental scanning, business intelligence, enterprise application integration, business process management, computer assisted auditing tools and techniques and big data

Real-time reporting in accounting or simply real-time accounting offers many benefits when compared to conventional periodic reporting. Traditionally, enterprises require financial or non-financial reporting based on quarterly and annual periods. Yet, the rapid change that occurs on market and society causes this periodic reporting to become quickly outdated. Higher competition among enterprises demands for more updated information to enable management to rapidly adapt to opportunities and answer problems. Real-time accounting addresses these needs, but needs new technological answers. In this article we present some technologies which can help the implementation of real-time accounting, namely, business process management, mobile devices, cloud computing, business intelligence, enterprise architecture and enterprise application integration

This article presents a reflection on the role of Business Process Management and associated technologies on supporting/evolving current Accounting Information Systems. Although traditional Accounting Information Systems fulfill the need of financial reporting, collecting data from central databases and consolidating it, so that the information can be easily consumed by decision-makers, they were not created bearing in mind the idea of performing business process oriented accounting. Organizations have always worked in a business process oriented way either implicit or explicit. Business Process Management adoption as a management practice has been gaining popularity in recent years, making sense an evolution of Accounting Information Systems towards a business process oriented accounting supported on a Business Process Management Suite. The benefits of this evolution include, among others, the flexibility and agility in business process redefinition, the empowerment of knowledge workers, the implementation of control points for data collection to produce real-time reports and alerts relating the use of financial and non-financial information, so that decision-makers can act on

Nowadays, Universities and other Training Institutions need to clearly identify the Information Technology (IT) skills that companies demand from IT practitioners. This is essential not only for offering appropriate and reliable university degrees, but also to help future IT professionals on where to focus in order to achieve better job positions. In an attempt to address this issue, this study rely on 102 Chief Information Officers, from Iberian large companies, to characterize current IT professionals and what is expected from future hirings. Results revealed that IT Technicians and Senior Analysts are the predominant positions and also that future hiring will request candidates with at least two to five years of work experience. The two most important skills found were core functions at the IT department: business knowledge and user support. In contrast, traditional competences such as web development and management of emerging technologies were less demanded.

The aim of this paper is to empirically test not only the direct effects of information and communication technology (ICT) capabilities and integrated information systems (IS) on firm performance, but also the moderating role of IS integration along the supply chain in the relationship between ICT external and capabilities and business performance. Data collected from 102 large Iberian firms from Spain and Portugal are used to test the research model. The hierarchical multiple regression analysis is employed to test the direct effects and the moderating relationships proposed. Results show that external and internal ICT capabilities are important drivers of firm performance, while merely having integrated IS do not lead to better firm performance. In addition, a moderating effect of IS integration in the relationship between ICT capabilities and business performance is found, although this integration only contributes to firm performance when it is directed to connect with suppliers or customers rather than when integrating the whole supply chain.