Case for Semantic Oriented Accounting and Audit Working Papers

 A kludge (or kluge) is an engineering/computer science term that describes what is best described as a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is typically clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain; but it gets the job done. By contrast, elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness and simplicity. 

Accounting and audit working papers have evolved to become a kludge. That needs to be fixed. My solution is proposed in the document Case for Semantic Oriented Accounting and Audit Working Papers.  VisiCalc popularized spreadsheets.  Then Lotus 1-2-3 improved the capabilities of VisiCalc.  Then Excel improved upon Lotus 1-2-3.  Google Spreadsheet added some features beyond what Excel provided.  It is time for another improvement in the capabilities of the spreadsheet.

Or, maybe the improved tool is not really even a spreadsheet. Perhaps in is more of a "knowledge graph" maybe with "pivot table" type capabilities with a built in DATALOG rules/logic engine. Here is a high level summary of the capabilities:

  • Rather than being presentation-oriented “workbooks”, “sheets”, “rows”, “columns”, and “cells”; the spreadsheets are logical-oriented models.
  • Rather than rules always being combined within a spreadsheet; rules can be separated from the actual spreadsheet to enforce and control the information provided within the spreadsheet.  Imagine a set of spreadsheets all using exactly the same rules.
  • Rather than using position-oriented linking of cells which tends to be brittle; a robust, trustworthy linking mechanism is used, think “linked data” and the semantic web.
  • Rather than being documentation and maintenance nightmares; spreadsheets are self-documenting.
  • Rather than being uncontrollable; boundaries, guardrails, and bumpers can be set and controlled; no more wild behavior of those creating spreadsheets.
  • Rather than being a proprietary format; a global standard spreadsheet format is used.
  • Rather than being a “sheet” or “workbook”; the spreadsheet can be worked with as a machine-readable knowledge graph.
  • Rather than being a “sheet”; the spreadsheet is really a multidimensional pivot table that uses a global standard multidimensional model.  (Not OLAP, but does support OLAP and not restricted by the limitations of OLAP. Not a three dimensional “cube” but rather an “n-dimensional” hypercube . Also, rather than being read only like OLAP, the model would be read/write.)
  • Rather than being readable by humans; a spreadsheet is readable by machines and from that machine readable representation an understandable human readable representation could be generated automatically generated; or, facts can be mapped into a pixel perfect representation if you desire.
  • Rather than being limited to tabular data; those table-oriented limitation are gone.
  • Rather than being individual presentation-oriented tables; logic-oriented representations fit together like “Lego blocks”.

Look no further: XBRL-based reports can do all of the above, today. Here are my test cases, use cases, a conformance suite, and a showcase of reports. Decide for yourself!

This is the information age. Spreadsheets filled a need.  But there are other needs and traditional spreadsheets are probably not the answer.

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