Old wine in new bottles? A preliminary exploration of management accounting in cloud computingbusiness models

Abstract

This paper begins to explore how management accounting has evolved over recent years, with a particular focus on web and cloud business models. In recent years the web has developed to include social media, rich user interaction and businesses without ‘bricks and mortar’ and ‘high street shops’. In this context, this paper explores how management accounting techniques and/or practices are used to provide key decision-making information to businesses operating within this environment. The research here is based on an exploratory case study, which we call Web Accounting (WA). Using some constructs on general organisational change put forward by Dawson (2003), we interpret the process of change in the business and resulting changes in management accounting. Our preliminary results show that, at least in this case organisation, there has been a shift in focus to decision-relevant revenues. We also observed that key performance indicators are mainly non-financial, and are based on and driven by the increased focus on revenues. Additionally, WA inadvertently used some traditional management accounting techniques, albeit in a ‘new’ manner. Due to this paper’s exploratory nature, we cannot claim generalizability of results. However, given the novel nature of our findings and the lack of research to date on new business models and management accounting practices, we hope to encourage further research