Abstract:
Accounting generally plays a vital role in businesses. Accountants are required to handle gigantic data for achieving their task. In case data must be gathered from internally and externally. On this COVID-19 outbreak time, Organization’s strategic and tactical management employees started to work from home while operational employees worked onsite. So, organizations are willing to be aware and adopt a new platform to interconnect all of them. Organizations pursuing a model, where employees easily collect access and alter the data, making decisions, communicating and controlling the overall process through a single platform. The development of the cloud concept is a remarkable solution for this information management system. The concept of cloud accounting, an innovative model for accountants to collect and store accounting data, run accounting reports and share information effectively. This study's main objective is to explore the level of awareness, adoption, and experience of using cloud accounting among the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Sri Lanka before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. All SMEs listed under Sri Lanka Chamber of Small and Medium Industries selected as the sample. This study used questionnaires to compare the awareness level of this emerging technology, to what extent they utilize this technology and the user experience of the technology before and after this pandemic. The analysis suggests that there is a significant mean difference of awareness and adoption of cloud accounting before and after COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, 35% of the SMEs started to use cloud accounting. However, their experience of using cloud accounting remains unchanged in both periods. Moreover, 8% of the SMEs are newly adopting this technology in this pandemic time. So, this study urges digitalization in the field of accounting support to the business in this outbreak time. Overall study recommends SMEs be able to enhance the performance through cloud accounting
