Accountancy Professionals in 4.0 Era: what now?

Abstract

Globalization has given rise to digital accounting with new ways of sharing information, particularly digitalization of the profession.

The teaching of accounting must go along with technological changes in preparing students for the challenges of 4.0 environments. We used action research to present an innovative teaching method that aims to move around the academic environment into real life problems of organizations resulting from digital accounting. We present the case of a higher education accounting school where students face a different methodology of teaching and learning, as they are the centre of the process of learning. They are the managers of a virtual company during a calendar year, two school semesters, performing activities of real companies, dealing with legal deadlines and taxes. Students organised in groups of 3, have at their disposal a set of technologies, which allows them to work with a real ERP and process the information created and organised by them in the database with about 1800 digital documents (two semesters). At the end of the academic year, each student has his or her electronic portfolio with all the digital documentation dealt with in the implementation of the activities proposed during the third year of his or her degree course. The study reveals the concern of teaching and learning with digital documentation, incorporating it in business simulation classes based on an integrated ERP. In this way, students have contact with real life problems in a simulated technological context while at school.