Accounting Current Topic Paper

In the beginning, Luca Pacioli was the first to describe the systems of debits, credits, journals and ledgers in 1494. This can be considered as the “birth” of accounting. The beginning of the shift in accounting technology came in the form of simple spreadsheet programs and slowly grew. In 1978, VisiCalc was launched and upgraded companies from manually calculated spreadsheets to pioneered, automatically updating cells. This was the first spreadsheet computer program, originally created for the Apple II. It turned the microcomputer from a hobby computer to a serious business tool.  After this innovative take, QuickBooks was launched in 1998. It dominated the market for day-to-day bookkeeping. According to statistics, over 80% of bookkeepers used QuickBooks. The initial release of the software raised a lot of security concerns that were remedied by the 2000 update. The update came with audit trails, double entries and better security features. This was an early beginning to a never ending technological change.

Today, cloud computing is dominating the medium to small sized organization industry. According to NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), cloud computing is “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”.

There are many sides to the effectiveness of cloud computing in the business world. However, there are also disadvantages and great concerns in terms of security about the technology. According to the AICPA, cloud computing is an increasing trend for companies to outsource certain accounting and IT functions. Cloud computing has become a solution for small to medium sized organizations. Most SMEs are embarking on this trend as it does not come with any traditional upfront infrastructure costs or unpredictable support and maintenance costs of on-site software and hardware.