From Decentralized Accounting to Cloud-Based Shared Services: Organizational Transformation in Corporate Financial Accounting Digitalization

Abstract

Whether the transfer of accounting tasks from dispersed business units to a shared platform improves processing efficiency and cross-functional coordination depends on how accounting rules, business evidence, and execution responsibilities are reassigned. To address the limited evidence on pre-transformation conditions, implementation sequences, and comparable outcomes, this study assembles public materials released in 2026. It traces POWERCHINA’s group-wide shared-services development from 2021 to 2026, the post-establishment automation upgrades at China Energy’s Guoshen Company from 2024 to 2026, and changes in task assignment and service operations on China Energy’s Yunxiang Zhilian cloud-supported platform. These cases are supplemented by statistics on the organizational configurations of 71 central state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with established shared-service centers. The analysis combines chronological event coding, matched before-and-after comparisons for individual tasks, conditional proportions, and assessment of evidential identifiability. At Guoshen, reported bank–enterprise reconciliation time fell from 120 to 2 minutes, and financial-data synchronization from 1,440 to 5 minutes, corresponding to reductions of 98.33% and 99.65%. Among the 33 central SOEs with separately established shared-service centers, 20 nevertheless followed group-wide planning. This study develops a five-stage sequence—baseline diagnosis, standardization, establishment of shared services, platform integration, and task reallocation with outcome monitoring—and distinguishes observed task-level changes from post-implementation operating indicators without comparable baselines and effects that cannot be identified causally.