Effect of Cloud Accounting on Accounting Reporting Quality of Nigerian Emerging Economy.

The study investigated the impact of implementing cloud accounting on the quality of financial reporting in the banking industry in Nigeria. A survey design was adopted, which was descriptive, targeting professional accountants at the 24 deposit money banks as quoted by Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN, 2024). As reported by the CBN (2024 survey), the banking sector has 3,682 professional accountants. A sample size of 361 respondents was obtained using Taro Yamane sampling formula and data were collected using a well structured, closed ended questionnaire that was done electronically through Google Forms. The research questions were analyzed by use of descriptive statistics, which is the mean and standard deviation, whereas the hypotheses were tested using linear regression. The results showed that the use of cloud accounting is slowly growing among Nigerian banks where there is indication that it is used both in the financial transactions and in the departmental finance operations. The adoption is however not complete with traditional systems being still in use in various accounting processes. The major factors that have led to adoption are cost saving, availability of financial information, assistance to management, and regulatory compliance needs, whereas poor IT infrastructure remains a significant limitation. The advantages mentioned are that there are lower costs of operation, timely availability of financial data, better collaboration, and better financial planning. However, obstacles like the expense of implementation, poor internet connectivity, lack of technical skills, resistance by the employees and data security remain as barriers to complete implementation. The regression results revealed that the adoption of cloud accounting can be used to explain 48%t of the variation in the quality of the reporting, which is a factor that has a significant positive impact.