The Routledge Companion to Accounting Information Systems

11

Accountants’ roles and accounting-related technologies

João Oliveira

Introduction

This chapter discusses how the roles of accountants in organisations have been and may continue to be affected by developments in information systems (IS), and accounting and integrated systems in particular. Our examination spans across both financial accountants’ and management accountants’/controllers’ roles (Gerdin et al., 2014), rebalancing the literature with greater attention to the latter. Many researchers characterised management accountants’ roles and their evolution and explanatory factors, with recent attention on the shift from being a “bean counter” to becoming a “business partner” (for example, Burns et al., 2014; Byrne and Pierce, 2007; Goretzki ...