Outsourcing of accounting services in digital age

Accounting function deals with recording, reporting and advising activities. In general, larger companies do not outsource routine tasks, since they need accounting information for making decisions more often than smaller enterprises, that outsource accounting primarily to fulfil their legal obligations. Digitalization facilitates remote access to data, electronic data exchange, instant communication and automatic data processing. This paper investigates outsourcing of accounting services in digital age considering several collaboration arrangements. We mobilized transaction costs economics and resource-based view as theoretical framework, accounting services market from Romania as context and case study as research method involving 3 accounting firms. Our results indicated that clients’ decisions to insource, outsource or co-source the accounting services depend on the availability of internal and external professionals, their costs, frequency of information need and technology readiness. Accounting process means to receive documents from clients, process data from documents based on the agreed terms, prepare and submit the reports to clients. Technologies like robotic process automation and artificial intelligence ensure faster data processing, accurate information and prompt reactions. Nowadays more large companies could outsource their accounting due to e-invoice system and cloud technology. Having in view the clients’ demands, accounting firms can deliver on-site, hybrid or remote services. Our study has implications for accounting firms and their clients and we presented what opportunities they have in digital age for collaboration. Our contribution was to show that e-invoice system and digital technologies enhance the provision of remote services and accounting firms could also target larger companies as clients.