It was wonderful experience to be invited in the prestigious meeting held by American Accounting Association. The meeting was attended by Master students, Ph.D students, Researchers, Lecturers, Professors (especially Professor Wayne Thomas, the leading author of Intermediate Accounting textbook) and Practitioners from different institutions. I am able to present my paper about “New Accounting Regime to Serve National Interest”, “The Information Content of New Employee Benefit Accounting Standard” and “Big Data Implication to Materiality in Accounting and Auditing”. I received the support for those topics as well as constructive feedback to enhance the later research output. In addition, some Professors also gave me information and potential access for conducting a survey in the US for qualified respondents such as partners. In addition, I also get the insight of using Amazon mturk for experimental research.
I also have the chance to learn from Professors and Ph.D students who presented the different ranges of research papers topic such as Big Data, Taxation, Data Analytics, Strategic Accounting, Accounting Technology, Auditing etc. The questions and answer during the presentation gave me better insight on conducting different type of research such as the challenges and solution tools. Especially, Professor Guido L. Geerts presented “Embedding Big Data and Analytics in Accounting” using Power BI and Hadoop. His presentation benefit me for my upcoming dissertation with the topic “Big Data and Analytics Implication to Accounting Materiality” that is supervised by Dr Sebastian Hoffmann. This topic is really new and not many academia conducted the research for the implication of Big Data to accounting materiality standard. Even, Prof Guido L. Geerts suggest the discussion of the materiality concern to be addressed to Prof Miklos A Varsahelyi. In addition, there is a second chance to hear valuable Big Data research presentation conducted by Professor Monica Mendoza about “Using IRS Big Data as a Budgeting Tool for Managers”. I was able to discuss the concept of materiality influenced by the availability of Big Data with Prof Mendoza.
Furthermore, the meeting also held Big Data Accounting IS workshop utilising Tableau taught by expert practitioner Brian Russell from Tableau corp. He taught us to use the application using several sources of data. I was able to hands on with Tableau application installed on my personal laptop, with the software download link provided by him. I realised that Tableau is really impressive software to visualise and to analyse big data. The application can generate maps, sales concentration with different figures. Even, this software can be linked directly to database located in SAP, Oracle, Cloud etc. Using Tableau, the analytics of Big Data become possible, preferable and disclosable. It is so easy to detect the anomalies in the data with different set of time ranges, locations and factors. Experiencing this technical skills of using Tableau for Big Data Analytics, it is now become more clearer to think about the implications to accounting. Using Tableau Data Analytics, Accountant can analyse and disclose more relevant and faithful representative information. In addition, Auditor can conduct population testing instead of sample based testing to detect high risk transactions. In conclusion, I feel very happy to learn great knowledge from many Professors, Researchers and Expert Practitioners. It enhance my entrepreneurial skills both in research and in practice. Thanks to University of Edinburgh Business School, Santander and Indonesian Government Endowment Fund for Education.
The link for the full schedule event including me as presenter can be found here http://aaahq.org/Meetings/2018/Southeast-Region-Meeting/Program
