Revolutionizing Accounting: The Bright Future of Blockchain Technology - Las Vegas Edition

So there are lots of benefits to the apparent benefits of blockchain technology within an accounting framework: greater transparency; greater accuracy; greater easy access to the ledger – real time access, as it were; all of this pretty much impossible to tamper with, to falsify, practically speaking. But there are some problems associated with blockchain as well: it’s very expensive to get up and running in the first place, very expensive; there are very few standardized protocols; there’s an enormous commitment of capital, of technology, and little assistance from telecoms companies, and here we’re talking about the broader paradigm shift – a change of paradigm where before we were dealing with ‘accounting as we know it’ and all is going to change with a shift.

Taxation and related compliance procedures are going to take more and more time and become ever more complicated as we go along. There seem to be only two options for this: either complicating known procedures even further, or simplifying them down to the bare minimum. Blockchain technology enables the second option. For instance, certain smart contracts will always know how much tax is payable in any (and at any) given moment, and, whenever the tax is paid, they will clear and effect the payment procedure, too. With utilizing blockchain, tax procedures are going to become almost entirely automated, the data integrity guaranteed right from the start, and the compliance virtually unassailable.

Another example of how accounting can help to both detect and prevent fraud already exists: every transaction is inscribed in blockchain’s immutable ledger, and so any attempts to engage in fraud are easily detectable. Moreover, it is possible to prevent fraud altogether as blockchain’s data is capable of being integrated with the sophisticated, ever-evolving algorithms of artificial intelligence so as to instantly detect suspicious activities, alert intervention in real-time and prevent any fraudulent activity.

Another reason would lie in financial forecasting and budgeting, made more accurate and reliable thanks to blockchain. In light of blockchain, companies would have reliable and reproducible real-time financial data which forms basic inputs for predictive analytics models. The predictive analytics thus produced would be much more reliable and accurate, paving the way for informed decisions. Blockchain-enabled predictive analytics leads to more reliable forecasts. For instance, companies could follow real-time financial data to monitor and fine-tune existing budgets in order to optimize their allocations and planning.

First, by making the same true data available to all participants (single source of truth), backup groups cannot form with other sources, thereby guaranteeing greater consistency in producing data feeds to the decision-maker, thus improving the quality of her data feeds. Second, by making the feed available in real time, quality improves further by providing the decision-maker with higher-quality data feeds for faster decision-making. Lastly, by combining a single, real-time high-quality feed with tools generating additional inferences from those feeds – perhaps sophisticated analytics tools – you can improve your decision results even further by analyzing more deeply and making more accurate forecasts.