Accounting Information Systems: Evolving towards a Business Process Oriented Accounting

This article presents a reflection on the role of Business Process Management and associated technologies on supporting/evolving current Accounting Information Systems. Although traditional Accounting Information Systems fulfill the need of financial reporting, collecting data from central databases and consolidating it, so that the information can be easily consumed by decision-makers, they were not created bearing in mind the idea of performing business process oriented accounting. Organizations have always worked in a business process oriented way either implicit or explicit. Business Process Management adoption as a management practice has been gaining popularity in recent years, making sense an evolution of Accounting Information Systems towards a business process oriented accounting supported on a Business Process Management Suite. The benefits of this evolution include, among others, the flexibility and agility in business process redefinition, the empowerment of knowledge workers, the implementation of control points for data collection to produce real-time reports and alerts relating the use of financial and non-financial information, so that decision-makers can act on.