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How technology is changing accounting practices
Advances in technology have led to a reduced demand for traditional accountancy services and created new opportunities and challenges. ICAEW's Tech Faculty outlined how digital technologies, are changing accountancy practices and their work in its report "Providing leadership in a digital world".
Audit firms are investing in big data and analytics to support new approaches to audit, as well as their other services. The shift to full dataset analysis means less reliance on data sampling, which allows for greater emphasis on spotting patterns, outliers and exceptions. The result is that audit activities can be more focused on the areas of greatest risk.At the same time the auditing processes are increasingly standardised and automated, leading to greater consistency in quality, and additional data sources and predictive models provide opportunities to identify business risks and better plan audit activities.