The information age has important implications for accounting because that is what
accountants are—knowledge workers. In fact, accountants have always been in the
‘‘information business’’ because their role has been, in part, to communicate accurate
and relevant financial information to parties interested in how their organizations are
performing. The information age also includes the increasing importance and growth of
e-business, conducting business over the Internet or dedicated proprietary networks, and
e-commerce, a subset of e-business, which refers mostly to buying and selling transactions.
In many ways, accounting is itself an information system—i.e., a communicative
process that collects, stores, processes, and distributes information to those who need
it. For instance, corporate accountants develop financial statements for external parties
and such other reports asaccounts receivable aging analysesfor internal managers. But
users of accounting information sometimes criticize AISs for only capturing and reporting
financialtransactions. They claim that financial statements often ignore some of the most
important activities that influence business entities. For example, the financial reports of
a professional basketball team would not include information about hiring a new star
because this would not result in journal entries in the franchise’s double-entry accounting
system.