XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting

The Atomic Design Methodology is a very useful way to think about "graphs" and "digital" and "information" and "models".  Tools that a business professional will use need to be special purpose tools not general purpose tools.  Below you see a set of financial reporting frameworks that start small then grow larger and more complex and sophisticated.  But the foundation , the fundamental model  of each is the same. Rather than end up with a kludge ; I have consciously attempted to remove all possible accidental complexity from my Seattle Method framework.  All of these working proof of concepts are available on GitHub . You can also see actual reports using the reporting frameworks in my set of reference implementations of reports . Here are some things to fiddle with to help accountants, auditors, and analysts think about how to work with digital information: ( To see the specific view I am showing, from the hierarchy on the LEFT, in the "...

The term "financial engineer" is appearing more and more; used differently than the more common definition related to designing financial instruments. The term "financial engineer" is being overloaded. It is my observation that (a) most are getting this notion incorrect and are not really thinking very deeply about this idea and all that is entailed and (b) the term "financial engineer" already means something else. First, let me point something out. Remember the "learn to code" movement? This article, To Code or Not to Code: should lawyers learn to code?  The AICPA had a similar article asking if accountants should learn to code which they have subsequently removed from their web site. And then you have those that believe that coding was going away,  Soon We Won't Program Computers. We'll Train Them Like Dogs,  Well, now it seems that anyone can code using an LLM. And then you have Kurt Cagle saying,  Data, Not Software, Will Determine t...

The article, What the spreadsheet knows that the system does not , provides this definition of a shadow spreadsheet: "A shadow spreadsheet is a locally created spreadsheet used alongside or instead of an organisation’s official software to perform work, preserve information or support decisions that the formal system does not adequately handle." The article, Shadow Spreadsheet , provides this definition: "A shadow spreadsheet is the file where a critical metric actually gets produced, outside any system of record, maintained by one person, and unknown to most of the people who consume its output." The article,  The shadow spreadsheet problem , describes a shadow spreadsheet thus: "A shadow spreadsheet (a form of what analysts call shadow IT) is any unofficial tool a team builds to do work the sanctioned system can't. It rarely starts as rebellion. It starts as a workaround: one person exports data, massages it in Excel or Google Sheets to answer a question ...

Twenty five years ago,  I literally could not tell you the difference between "syntax" and "semantics".  Over that time, I have made it my business to understand this information so that I could figure out how to build what I was trying to build. This is what I have figured out: As I understand it, there are fundamentally five types or categories of systems : Symbolic : marks (symbols, tokens, strings, formulas) ( example ) Structural : patterns, organization (schemas, tables, models) ( example ) Semantic : concepts (concepts, relationships, meaning) ( example ) Pragmatic : grounding (meaning in use, grounded truth, grounded in real world truth) ( example ; human readable , example2 , prototype ) Cognitive : understanding (interpretation, judgement, understanding) ( example ) Each of these five types or categories or layers of systems have certain specific capabilities.  Each higher number adds additional capabilities beyond what the lower number has. These five typ...

Foundations are absolutely vital in engineering something.  A foundation is the underlying system of principles, definitions, and organizing structures that makes higher‑level reasoning, communication, and knowledge possible. A foundation is the base layer of meaning that everything else depends on. A foundation: establishes the primitives, defines the rules, sets the constraints, determines what is possible, ensures consistency, enables interoperability. A foundation is the ground truth of a domain. Meaning is intersubjective . Communication is impossible if there is no mutual cognitive agreement and understanding. Shared understanding  is important.  This blog post is an attempt to move closer to a shared understanding. * * * Overview * * * Symbols, when arranged into structures, become meaningful only through semantic mappings that generate concepts; a theory then specifies those concepts and their relations, and facts are the concrete assertions that instantiate tho...

The purpose of this blog post is to explain the essence of assurance at a high level and in terms a lay person can understand.  Primarily, I want to explain the key aspects of an audit; but to do that, it helps to understand the other two forms of assurance.  For certified public accountants (CPAs) and chartered accountants (CAs) as they are called  in the United States, Canada, and in many other jurisdictions; there tend to be three standard levels of assurance provided over general purpose financial statements: Compilation or No Assurance : The CPA/CA assembles financial information into the form of a  financial statements but does not verify information. A compilation is essentially financial statement preparation with disclosure that no assurance is provided. Review or Limited Assurance : The CPA/CA performs very limited inquiries and analytical procedures to conclude whether anything appears materially misstated. This provides moderate or limited assurance. Audi...