Integrating QuickBooks® in financial accounting classrooms: evidence from the UAE

ABSTRACT

The surge in technology adoption has transformed students into ‘digital natives’ who require innovative teaching methods to enhance their engagement and learning. This paper investigates the impact of integrating QuickBooks®, an accounting mobile app, on students’ learning, engagement, and interest in the course. It utilizes a survey questionnaire and focus group design to collect data from a sample of 160 undergraduate financial accounting students at a leading public university in the UAE. The findings reveal that students positively viewed the use of QuickBooks® on their learning experience. Students reported enhanced class engagement and interest in the course, which was otherwise viewed as generally dull. Using QuickBooks® in solving assessments was perceived more effective relative to pen-and-paper assessments and during uncertain times. This paper contributes to the literature on the impact of mobile technology in accounting education and suggests innovative tools to enhance the graduate attributes and employability for educators’ consideration.

KEYWORDS:

• Cloud mobile apps
• financial accounting
• student engagement
• accounting education
• learning

Acknowledgment

The author is grateful to the valuable comments and assistance of Ahmed Farhoud, Raghdaa Ali, Sabah Abdelhakam and the insightful comments of the editor and anonymous reviewers. The author is thankful to the funding provided by Zayed University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.statista.com/statistics/218984/number-of-global-mobile-users-since-2010/

2 According to Statista, in the UAE, 97.6% of young adults, aging between 16-24, use mobile phones.

3 https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-global-overview-report

4 https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/30437. The UAE leads the global mobile index by Ookla in 2021.It is ranked as the country with the fastest mobile network speed. See https://www.speedtest.net/global-index

5 The use of technology in education has been evolving parallelly with a movement in the accounting profession, where professionals can bring their own devices (Bring your own device BYOD). Although BYOD has the potential risks of overloading the network, lack of security, and potential distraction, it has the benefits of enhancing cost effectiveness, familiarity, and learning. See https://www.ifac.org/knowledge-gateway/preparing-future-ready-professionals/discussion/byod-and-cyod-accounting-firms

6 https://QuickBooks.intuit.com

7 Other accounting apps have been developed and can be used by accounting students, such as TurboCASH, Lacerte Tax and Money manager. However, they lack some features as accounts receivable and bank reconciliation, among other budgeting features.

8 There is an embedded drawback in the design/structure of the app. Although it provides quick access to enter data, which is eventually reflected in the financial statements, it does not allow students to see the step-by-step effect on the accounting cycle. Therefore, being originally designed for businesses, the app skips the steps of journalizing transactions, posting to ledger accounts, and preparing the trial balance. It provides ease and convenience to enter data from source documents to directly see the effects of the final step of the cycle, i.e., preparation of financial statements.

9 https://www.intuit.com. It should be noted that research about using mobile technology in education has been coupled with the underlying assumption of cost effectiveness while ignoring initial funding and investment in infrastructure, software, and training. The use of the free features of QuickBooks® in this study mitigates the noise resulting from this underlying assumption.

10 See accessed: May 19, 2022. https://u.ae/en/information-and-services/education/higher-education/joining-higher-education-institutions-/higher-studies-for-non-uae-nationals.

11 Some examples of widely used mobile apps that are general-purpose (accounting-related), include: Nearpod, Quizlet, Kahoot, Poll everywhere, and Socrative, (TurboCASH, Money manager), etc.

12 This percentage represents the collective percentages of respondents whose responses are ‘strongly agree’ and ‘agree’. All percentages reported in this section are based on percentages in the tables, rounded to the nearest figure.

13 During COVID-19 pandemic, universities banned pen-and-paper assessments for hygiene and physical distancing reasons. Hence, during pandemic interval, QuickBooks was used for solving the assessment. The aim is not to introduce noise to the test, by the possibility that students used other applications (on their mobiles or laptops such as document editing apps) to solve the assignment rather than physically using a pen and paper then scanning their answer and uploading it to Blackboard.