Information Technology (IT) and digitalisation have been influencing businesses and management accounting for some time:The use of Information Technology (IT) and digitalisation has led to accounting...

Introduction: With globalization, the structure and size of business organizations have increased to a large extent. The magnitude of information inflow and outflow has increased and management of such information is a big challenge for business (Suhaimi, Nawawi and Salin, 2016). The management and processing of such huge data are not possible by humans without errors. So it brings a challenge for the business organizations. This challenge has resulted in innovations in the IT sector and the development of new tools, software, and applications for managing and storing data more efficiently. Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERPS) and Cloud Computing are results of IT innovation. These tools help to manage the business in a more efficient way and change the way of doing business. A brief discussion of how ERPS, Cloud Computing, and Big Data have changed the business environment and how role of the management accountants has evolved is given below:
Development and Impact of Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERPS) on role of management accountant: ERPS is considered an important tool of IT which was invented during the 1990s. It is a business application or software that integrates the business processes of the whole organization and gathers information from all processes and departments (Al‐Mashari, 2002). The data from all processes is fetched and stored in a central database. This central data can be accessed by the employee of any department at any time. So ERPS has resulted in providing flexibility, efficiency, and performance improvement by integrating. During the early period, the scope of ERPS was limited to manufacturing departments or capital-intensive industries only. With the passage of time, its scope was expanded to other areas of business like human resources, accounting, finance, production planning, and other industries. Business Process Reengineering is the driving force behind ERPS development. Both demand a change in the organization’s structure.
The main role of a management accountant is to keep an eye on the changing business environment and provide information to make the decision in such conditions. Similarly, ERPS helps in bringing change to the business organization by integrating the whole organization (Ponorîca, Al-Saedi and Sadik, 2014). The ERPS has helped management accountants with flexibility in information generation, quality of financial statements and reporting has increased and the integration of all applications saved time for generation of the information. The main role of a management accountant is to provide information to senior management in the right format and at the proper time. In business, every opportunity has some timeliness. Once the time is gone, the opportunity is lost. ERPS is an invention in this direction that provides real-time information to management and other areas of the department for decision making. However the ERPS cannot work alone, it needs some technical and business compliments. The technical requirements for ERPS are education and training to staff, access to the internet, infrastructure planning, servers, and the requirement of well-trained technical staff for managing the system. The commitment of top-level management and support of employees is very much essential for planning and implementing an ERPS that meets the business needs. Otherwise, huge funds will be wasted and business can go in worse condition than it was before the implementation of EPRS. In the light of ERPS the role of management account is changing, they are now more of a change agent and have to understand the whole business subsystems to make sure proper use of IT technology for good results (Moll and Yigitbasioglu, 2019) . They have to devote more time to education, training on the usage of ERPS for the benefits of the organization. Their time would be more devoted to financial analysis for decision-making now instead of transaction processing. Aligning the business processes to ERPS is another challenge for accounting managers in this area. Before implementation of ERPS or any other IT innovation, the needs and requirements should be decided in advance. The management accountant is responsible to make a plan for the same. After...