Strategies for Implementing Accounting Software Systems within SMEs Essay - 1

Strategies for Implementing Accounting Software Systems within SMEs - Essay Example This especially relates to small businesses as their owners often lack the expertise beyond their core activities. Therefore the outcome of the research project will bring a list of recommendations for entrepreneurs based on the information concerning software implementation strategies acquired within the research. There is a wide choice of accounting software packages currently presented on the market addressing various needs of customer. In this highly diversified area, choosing the 'right' software system becomes an important and at the same time difficult issue leading to the importance of picking out the 'right' strategy for implementing accounting software. This problem requires further research, as it brings better understanding of links between accounting performance and strategies of software implementation. At first the researcher will contact from 10 to 15 SMEs to conduct interviews for gathering data needed for preparing a list of software implementation strategies used within those companies. Then the effectiveness of strategies will be evaluated and compared through measuring their accounting performance basing on the data gathered through interviewing. ... For that purpose the researcher will need a measuring system which will be developed within the research with the help of secondary data gathered through the literature review. The results of analysis will be used in the final report to recommend which strategies should be implemented with SMEs and which ones are better to avoid. Context: Setting, Background and Scope The proposed project will be based on the analysis of accounting performance of SMEs contacted during the research. Although temporal limits do not allow contacting a large number of SMEs in order to make the results of a research statistically more accurate, the project will be able to identify the most general trends in accounting software strategies. Then these trends are to be analysed from the scope of influencing the accounting performance of SMEs, i.e. from looking on their effectiveness. The measuring system developed within this project will particularly deal with changes in the accounting performance that occurred after the implementation of a certain strategy.' Project Strategic IT Value and Intention The results of the proposed research will be presented in a form of report analyzing software strategies used with SMEs with recommendations developed during the research. The recommendations on choosing a certain strategy for implementing accounting software systems developed within this project will be a useful contribution to the general theory of software implementation strategies explaining through evaluation of strategic approaches what steps a small to medium enterprise should take to implement a suitable accounting software successfully.