Digital Financial Reporting Technologies and Financial Reporting Quality of Listed Manufacturing Firms in Nigeria: Evidence from Cloud Accounting, Real-Time Reporting and Artificial Intelligence Integration

The rapid digitalisation of accounting functions has altered the way listed manufacturing firms in Nigeria capture transactions, process financial information and prepare corporate reports. While accounting automation is generally expected to strengthen reporting quality, the benefits of individual technologies may differ according to their depth of adoption, integration and organisational context. This study focuses specifically on three emerging dimensions of digital financial reporting technology—cloud accounting adoption, real-time financial reporting capability, and artificial intelligence and analytics integration—and examines their expected relationship with financial reporting quality among listed manufacturing firms in Nigeria. Financial reporting quality is operationalised through discretionary accruals, with lower discretionary accruals interpreted as evidence of higher reporting quality. The study is framed by agency theory and signalling theory. An ex post facto panel research design is proposed for the 2015–2024 period, using information obtained from published annual reports and audited financial statements of sampled listed manufacturing firms. The empirical model specifies discretionary accruals as a function of cloud accounting adoption, real-time financial reporting capability, artificial intelligence and analytics integration, and firm size. The Modified Jones Model provides the basis for estimating discretionary accruals. Existing evidence from the underlying broader accounting-automation study indicates negative associations for the three retained technology dimensions, with real-time financial reporting reaching conventional statistical significance in the original seven-variable specification, while cloud accounting and artificial intelligence/analytics did not reach the 5 percent threshold. However, those coefficients were estimated in the original seven-variable model and should not be reported as the final coefficients of the present reduced model until the reduced specification is re-estimated. The article therefore provides a complete publication-oriented framework while maintaining this empirical integrity. The study is expected to contribute to the Nigerian accounting-technology literature by isolating three increasingly important digital reporting capabilities and showing why adoption depth, system integration and organisational readiness matter for reporting quality.