XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting

This article is inspired by an article by Georg Philip Krog,  Why AI Can’t Read Your Contracts — And What To Do About It , where he explained why artificial intelligence cannot read legal contracts.  I am applying similar thinking to why artificial intelligence cannot read financial statements. The metaphor of a "costume" is excellent. Popular AI systems built on large language models (LLMs) face a fundamental limitation when confronted with something like a financial statement . LLMs can often extract and correctly summarize much of the information, say perhaps 87%.  The key point is, it is never 100%.  However, "much" or even "most" is not sufficient in a domain where precision is non negotiable. You never know which 13% is wrong, and that uncertainty makes the entire output unreliable. LLMs excel at the capability of predicting the next plausible word. That is their core competency. But interpreting a financial statement requires logical reasoning, not...

What does it mean to trust? ONTrust: A Reference Ontology of Trust is a paper which provides an ontology of trust and a rigorous discussion about trust. The paper is described as , "This paper is the culmination of a long-term research program of providing a solid ontological foundation on trust, by creating reference conceptual models to support information modeling, automated reasoning, information integration and semantic interoperability tasks." Additional Information: Procedural Knowledge Ontology (PKO) ValueFlows

Accounts, auditors, and analysts are about to get a significant  productivity boost ; complements of XBRL . Hard to believe, right? That hard to use, complicated monstrosity the regulators force you to use. If you don't know what SKOS, XBRL, OIM, and SBRM are; you are way, way behind the curve. The purpose of this blog post is to think about US GAAP metadata.  United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP) is the financial reporting framework used by public companies, private companies including small and medium sized organizations, not for profit organizations, and other such organizations. Like most, if not all financial reporting scheme; US GAAP is "grounded" in the fundamental accounting equation  which is the basis for double entry bookkeeping  (a.k.a. double entry accounting). Information for every financial related business event is recorded in the form of a balanced financial transaction similar to the financial transaction shown below (...

To effectively understand an XBRL-based digital report , you need to understand how to decompose and compose such a digital report.  In this article I am going to focus on decomposition . Decomposition is simply about taking the one big piece that is the report model and report and breaking that larger "whole" into physical, logical, and functional "parts". I am going to use a financial statement as an example, but these same ideas relate to reports at all levels of granularity including transaction level granularity, what I call the " mezzanine level " or working paper level granularity, financial statement level granularity, or financial analysis model level of granularity.  So, the explanation of the decomposition and composition of a financial statement also works for the other levels of granularity. As I have pointed out, a financial statement is a knowledge graph . What I mean by this is that whether the financial statement is on a clay tablet, o...

Semantics is the study of meaning ; the meaning behind the words we use. Semantics enable explainability and automation at scale. Semantics is a core enabler of communication. In his book, Inhabiting Babel , the author Nicholas Figay makes the following statement in an author's note on page 5: (emphasis is mine) " Drawing from work in systems engineering, modeling, interoperability, and ontologies, this book seeks to show that meaning is always mediated, situated, and carried by human collectives . Models, graphs, and algorithms do not eliminate this mediation; they displace it and sometimes render it invisible ." * * * So what precisely does that phrase mean? " Meaning is always mediated, situated, and carried by human collectives ."  That sentence is making three tightly linked claims about how meaning actually works in the real world. Breaking that one phrase down into those three claims, for clarity, you get: “ Meaning is mediated ” Meaning never arrives raw...

Inhabiting Babel, A Manifesto for Responsible Meaning Engineering is a book written by Nicolas Figay . This book is very practical and easy for a motivated business professional to read. For me, this book has both tempered my expectations as to what is possible and also reassured me of the real possibilities that exist if you do the required work. Accountants and auditors tend to be on the conservative side of the spectrum.  Me included. I am  actually rather conservative in terms of what technology might bring to the table for accounting, reporting, audit, and analysis. I have learned how to "cut the cards" when dealing with sales people and software vendors. What this book does is bring the wisdom from the experiences of an expert in system interoperability, enterprise architectures, and complex systems to helps motivated business professionals and technical professionals that truly want to understand artificial intelligence, cutting through the rhetoric and hype. This boo...