Effect of cloud accounting on an accounting firm’s costs

The accounting profession experienced a significant revolution when paper-based practices, such as manual bookkeeping of ledgers and trial balances, shifted to the use of specialised accounting software. However, most of the accounting software used by accounting firms were standalone packages that were not supported by the Web; therefore the demand from accounting firms for an integrated software that could act more like an overall business management system which could cater for various financial activities such as accounts, tax, payroll, administrative tasks and point of sales systems emerged. The demand for having a single integrated platform for all accounting services with greater accessibility to real time information gave rise to cloud based accounting software applications. The accelerating speed at which accounting firms are adopting cloud accounting software leads us to the primary research question of understanding the effects the introduction of cloud accounting software has on the operational cost of accounting firms. This study also aims to investigate the factors that motivate small accounting firms to embrace cloud technology. The primary method for data collection was through the distribution of questionnaires to 6 Small Accounting firms in Hamilton who have adopted the use of cloud accounting software. The researcher was able to gather some interesting findings from this study, in terms of understanding the effect of staff training and information technology costs that Accounting firms are faced with through the implementation of cloud accounting software. The majority of firms in this study agreed that they have experienced an overall increase in their operational costs, but believe that there has been an increase in their general organisational efficiency

FNNC: Achieving Fairness through Neural Networks

In classification models fairness can be ensured by solving a constrained optimization problem. We focus on fairness constraints like Disparate Impact, Demographic Parity, and Equalized Odds, which are non-decomposable and non-convex. Researchers define convex surrogates of the constraints and then apply convex optimization frameworks to obtain fair classifiers. Surrogates serve only as an upper bound to the actual constraints, and convexifying fairness constraints might be challenging. We propose a neural network-based framework, \emph{FNNC}, to achieve fairness while maintaining high accuracy in classification. The above fairness constraints are included in the loss using Lagrangian multipliers. We prove bounds on generalization errors for the constrained losses which asymptotically go to zero. The network is optimized using two-step mini-batch stochastic gradient descent. Our experiments show that FNNC performs as good as the state of the art, if not better. The experimental evidence supplements our theoretical guarantees. In summary, we have an automated solution to achieve fairness in classification, which is easily extendable to many fairness constraints

Earnings Inequality in India: Has the Rise of Caste and Religion Based Politics in India had an Impact?

Since 1989, there has been a sharp increase in the role of caste and religion in determining political fortunes at both state and federal levels in India. As a consequence, significant intercaste and inter-religion differences in earnings have the potential to stall the process of economic reforms. Yet, the patterns and determinants of such differences remain unexplored. We address this lacuna in the literature, and explore the determinants of the differences in inter-caste and inter-religion earnings in India during the 1987-99 period, using the 43rd and 55th rounds of National Sample Survey (NSS). Our results suggest that (a) earnings differences between “upper” castes and SC/ST have declined between 1987 and 1999, (b) over the same period, earnings differences between Muslims and non-Muslims have increased, to the detriment of the former, and (c) inter-caste and inter-religion differences in earnings can be explained largely by corresponding differences in educational endowment and returns on age (and, hence, experience). However, differences in returns on education do not explain inter-caste and interreligion earnings differences to a great extent.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57199/1/wp819 .pd