Modern Spreadsheet

The traditional electronic spreadsheet is a very useful tool. The spreadsheet has been around for more than 40 years, an indispensable tool of accountants, auditors, and analysts.  They are the right tool for many situations. But they are not the right choice in other situations.  Also, as I have pointed out in the past; the process of creating financial reports tends to be inefficient, error prone, described as an old school manual process.

The average Fortune 1000 company, Gartner Research says, uses approximately 800 spreadsheets in the process of creating external financial statements submitted for regulatory reporting.

How can the electronic spreadsheet be described as such a useful tool but also be part of such inefficient and error prone processes?  Sure, electronic spreadsheets are a vast improvement over paper-based spreadsheets.

But is there a "better spreadsheet"?  Is there a more modern approach, a "modern spreadsheet" that could overcome some of the limitations and inherent risks of the contemporary electronic spreadsheet?

I think that there is and I have summarized my thoughts in the document Special Purpose Logical Spreadsheet for Accountants, a call for a more modern professional tool for accountants, auditors, and analysts which addresses the significant limitations and inherent risks when making use of traditional electronic spreadsheets.



Additional resources: 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Relational Knowledge Graph System (RKGS)

Image
Relational Knowledge Graph System (RKGS) is an interesting idea that combines the relational paradigm and the knowledge graph paradigm.  This documentation, Why RKGS , explains the idea. This gets even more interesting with the notion of "relational AI".  RelationalAI is described as follows by the company of the same name, Relational.ai : “RelationalAI is a cloud-based relational knowledge graph management system, with state of the art probabilistic processing and declarative reasoning at scale to make developing Data Applications a superpower for your business.” This notion of knowledge graphs represented in relational databases fits into my belief that knowledge graphs have two aspects: the expression SYNTAX and the logic of what is expressed or SEMANTICS. While the LOGIC of a knowledge graph is always the same regardless of technical syntax used to express that logic; there are many, many different technical syntaxes that can be used to represent a knowledge graph. There
Read more

Getting Started with Auditchain Luca

Image
(Note that a newer, production version as opposed to only the development version , of Luca Suite is available) The Innovator's Dilemma points out that disruptive innovations often look like toys that are doing everything wrong. Auditchain Luca , which is part of the Auditchain Suite , is a unique approach to creating a knowledge graph .  To experience using Auditchain Luca, have a look at the Getting Started with Auditchain Luca instructions. Be sure to grab the Excel and JSON import files used for this getting started exercise.   This getting started exercise uses one of several different approaches to getting information into a tool for constructing and viewing professional quality knowledge graphs .  Additional getting started guides will be made available over time. Auditchain Luca might not make sense to you if you don't understand the paradigm shift that is occurring and if you have not shifted your mental map. For the next step in your journey, consider trying creat
Read more

Evaluating the Quality of XBRL-based Financial Reports

Image
From the time public companies started submitting XBRL-based financial reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, I have been looking at those reports, trying to understand the XBRL-based reports, and trying to figure out how to get them right.  That information was used to figure out how to create software applications that help professional accountants get these reports right. Here is information that summarizes my testing and results which I stopped doing March 31, 2019: Analysis of the high level accounting relationships in the 10-Ks of about 5,716 financial reports  (5,063 public companies, about 89.1% got all these high level accounting relationships consistent with expectation, 623 were inconsistent and manual confirmation revealed the inconsistency was an error) Documentation that helps you understand 26 different types of errors in XBRL-based reports High quality documentation of hundreds of errors in XBRL-based reports submitted by public companies to the SEC Doc
Read more