Prior literature informs us that a company's decision to outsource a business process depends on process characteristics such as how frequently the process is performed or how specific the assets required by the process are. In this article, we compare the effects of accounting process characteristics on outsourcing decisions across users of traditional and cloud-based accounting information systems (AIS). By focusing on outsourcing of accounting processes among small and medium sized enterprises, we investigate the effect of five business process characteristics (frequency, human asset specificity, uncertainty, information intensity, and need for customer contact) on the outsourcing decision. Our results reveal that process frequency has a weaker negative effect on the outsourcing decision among users of cloud-based AIS. This appears to contribute to users of cloud-based AIS outsourcing a larger variety of accounting processes. Compared to traditional AIS, the inherent properties of cloud-based AIS such as ubiquitous access, scalability, and integration seem to encourage users of cloud-based AIS to also outsource processes that are frequently performed.

先前的文献告诉我们，公司将业务流程外包的决定取决于流程特征，例如流程执行的频率或流程所需资产的特定程度。在本文中，我们比较了会计流程特征对传统和基于云的会计信息系统（AIS）用户之间外包决策的影响。通过关注中小企业会计流程的外包，我们研究了五个业务流程特征（频率，人力资产专用性，不确定性，信息强度和与客户联系的需求）对外包决策的影响。我们的结果表明，处理频率对基于云的AIS用户之间的外包决策的负面影响较小。这似乎有助于基于云的AIS的用户外包更多种类的会计流程。与传统的AIS相比，基于云的AIS的固有属性（如无处不在的访问，可伸缩性和集成）似乎鼓励基于云的AIS的用户也将经常执行的流程外包。