How is the Adoption of E-invoicing System Affecting the Outsourcing of Accounting Services?

Digital technologies have significantly transformed our society by changing the way people communicate, work, and trade. Due to digitalisation, transactions occur faster and they can be easily tracked. Electronic data transfer enables automatic data processing and electronic archiving of documents. Worldwide, there is a growing interest from the tax authorities to monitor and control the business transactions. Considering that in many countries, taxpayers have to exchange e-invoices through the servers administered by the tax authorities. Over the years, the outsourcing of accounting services has become a very widespread practice among small companies for cost reduction reasons. This paper investigates the effects of e-invoicing system adoption on the outsourcing of accounting services. We had in view Technology Organisation Environment (TOE) framework as theory and Romanian business context. We collected data using the content shared online by big four companies on their own websites and accountants on social networks. Following our theoretical framework, the results indicated that environmental context, especially the government regulations, put pressure on organisations to digitalise their business processes or to update the existing technologies in order to accommodate e-invoicing. Our findings revealed that the mandatory adoption of an e-invoicing system creates new opportunities for those companies being larger in size to fully or partially outsource their accounting services. Most accountants believe that an e-invoicing system can remove information delays and it can ensure immediate access to data which is crucial for decision making in case of larger companies. Furthermore, e-invoicing system enables invoice tracking, continuous invoice processing in accounting, and near real-time reporting. Our study has implications for clients and accounting firms, and we emphasised that mandatory adoption of e-invoicing system has a strong impact on accounting outsourcing since it facilitates remote delivery of services and the use of cloud accounting, automatic data collection, and processing due to electronic data transfer.