ABSTRACT
Blockchain is one of the most recent disruptive technologies under the spotlight of business studies. Interestingly, it is recognized that blockchain technology makes a “collective accounting” by distributing a shared public ledger, i.e., a complete record of all past transactions on the network. Expected benefits like transparency, integrity and faithfulness of accounting information – among others – are widely highlighted within the academic literature. However, several conceptual and pragmatical issues are still under discussion, including some questionable positions threatening the double entry bookkeeping method. This paper aims to frame the blockchain within the accounting literature in order to address those issues and identify opportunities and challenges for practice. A systematic review of national and international publications was conducted to analyze the following pivotal elements: 1) the distributed ledger, containing all the transactions made, recorded and validated by the blockchain participants; 2) the triple entry accounting, for which every transaction is recorded by the debit, the credit and the cryptographic signature of the blockchain participants; and 3) the smart contracts, i.e., computerized transaction protocols that automatically execute the terms of a contract and, therefore, certain accounting entries. We discuss how the distributed technology which underpins the blockchain is the real main enhancement for corporate bookkeeping, whereas the principles of the double entry accounting are not substantially threatened. Hence, we develop several insights concerning the implications and consequences of future blockchain application in financial accounting, as follows: the most suitable configurations to define who and what should be recorded on an accounting blockchain; the involvement of regulators and standard setters in refining the ongoing accounting digitalization compliance process; the role of other disruptive technologies which could complement the strengths of the blockchain in recording accounting and non-accounting data. The main limitation of this paper is a lack of quantitative analysis of the selected publications (e.g., bibliometric analysis) and validity tests which could furtherly enrich our results. However, its original contribution concerns a careful analysis of the academic literature through the lens of the “Ragioneria” fundamentals with the aim to contrast the questionable belief of the forthcoming double entry accounting death.
KEYWORDS
blockchain, financial information, accounting digitalisation
