New Tool for Accountants, Auditors, Analysts

A new type of tool will be available (is becoming available) to support professional accountants.  This tool is somewhat similar to the traditional electronic spreadsheet but it works differently and provides different capabilities to professional accountants. This new tool will supplement the arsenal of tools available to accountants, auditors, and analysts.

This new tool is semantic oriented, model-based, and a global standard technical format.  To describe this tool in the past I have used the terms "modern spreadsheet" and "professional knowledge graph" and "deductive apparatus" and "semantic oriented accounting and audit working papers" and "knowledge product" and "logical spreadsheet" and "logic programming" and "logical digital twin of financial reports".

This new type of tool will help usher in modern accountancy. In this new era, machines will support accountants, auditors, and analysts even more than they do now.  Skilled craftsmen will create these new tools.  If you read Informatics for Accountancy you cannot help to understand why this new type of tool is important to accountants, auditors, and analysts.

To understand this new tool, first think of the traditional electronic spreadsheet, a useful workhorse.  But let us "tweak" that traditional tool, making some useful modifications for certain specific types of tasks.  The objective is to enable certain tasks currently performed by humans to be performed or augmented by computer-based processes.  Human task performance by a computer system.  Machine supporting humans.

Think "Lego blocks".  But rather than plastic Legos,  the blocks are blocks of information.  The block of information is glued together using logic.  You can string these information blocks together and create an information flow.  You create a "problem solving system".  The requirements of this problem solving system are:

  1. The system MUST be easy enough for the typical accountant, auditor, and  analyst to use effectively.
  2. The system MUST be safe and reliable, free from catastrophic failure of the software system.
  3. The system MUST be useful; performing work better, faster, and cheaper than current processes.

This new system will be used to create model-based semantic-oriented financial reports, accounting working papers, audit schedules, and financial analysis models. 

Here is how you make that new problem solving system work:

  • Rather than creating a general system that can do anything and therefore extremely hard for business professionals to use; you create a specialized system that performs only specific (narrow set of) tasks. (An example of a general system is SWI-Prolog. An example of a specialized system is an information block creation system built using SWI-Prolog.) 
  • Rather than using a presentation-oriented approach by storing information in “workbooks”, “sheets”, “rows”, “columns”, and “cells”; information is stored within the information Legos in logical-oriented models.
  • In order to store information within a high level logical model; you have to create that high level logical model and make that model understandable to accountants, auditors, and analysts.  This model is referred to as a "meta-model", a high level model that all other information Lego models that accountants, auditors, and analysts create must follow.
  • A software system is created that understands that high level  model.  What this provides the user of that software system is an approachable level of complexity (i.e. simplicity) that accountants, auditors, and analysts making use of that software can do so effectively.  The complexity is carefully and deliberately hidden from the software user, absorbed by the software system and platform which is used by the software system.
  • The software system has a global perspective (context), not a local perspective (context).
  • The software system is self-documenting; each information block is documented by the information block itself.
  • Information is linked to other information not by the position of the information (i.e. the cell or sheet or workbook) which can be brittle; a more robust, trustworthy, and reliable linking mechanism is used and since the software has a global perspective as opposed to local perspective; all links are guaranteed to be unique globally.
  • Wild behavior is simply not allowed. Rather, everything is intentionally and deliberately controlled.  If you need flexibility, then use a traditional spreadsheet.  But if you can live within the boundaries, guardrails, and bumpers defined by the logic of the robust model; high quality will be guaranteed by the software system.
  • The software system has access to any other system that you have been granted access rights to anywhere on the internet.  One benefit of this, as an example, is the ability for one set of rules to be published and some set of information blocks published by some set of publishers can all share those same rules to be sure that every information publisher is following the rules.
  • The software system has a built in global standard multidimensional model; think pivot table type flexibility.
  • The software system is readable by both machines and by humans.  This is possible because the machine readable information is 100% convertible to a natural or neutral human readable presentation format using the logic of the information.  Further, while the "natural" or "neutral" human readable presentation format might be good enough 80% of the time; for the other 20% of your information use cases,  there is a mechanism that provides effectively "pixel perfect" human readable presentations of the machine readable information.
  • Remember that this information Lego is a global standard.  You are not locked into using any specific software system.  To change software systems, simply point the information Lego to some other off-the-shelf software system that supports the global standard you might prefer.
  • State-of-the-art logic processing is available to every accountant, auditor, and analyst via the safe, reliable, predictable de facto standard DATALOG.
Can this system do 100% of what you need? No, it cannot.  But it can do 80% of what you demand and perform those tasks with certainty; guaranteed.  Therefore it is very possible to effectively automate a very significant portion of your work. (click for larger image)


Will traditional spreadsheets still be available?  Absolutely.  Traditional spreadsheets will still be useful.  This new type of tool provides new types of capabilities beyond what is possible with a traditional spreadsheet.

Additional Information:

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