Theory of Semantic Accounting and Audit Working Paper Archetypes

Years ago I posed a hypothesis that accounting and audit working papers and schedules could be represented using XBRL and/or RDF in machine readable form and turning those working papers from "documents" into "databases".  After significant experimentation and testing between 2015 and about 2022, I have reached the conclusion that my hypothesis was correct and now I have my theory of Semantic Accounting and Audit Working Paper Archetypes.

Here are many of the best details related to my testing, poking, and prodding and prototypes that I constructed to experiment with and test this hypothesis:

Accounting and audit working papers and schedules can, and should be, databases as opposed to documents. An archetype is a typical example of something, a template. An archetype can be seen as a good practices pattern; canonical form.

Today, accounting and audit working papers and schedules are collections of Excel files, Word documents, PDFs, HTML pages, and other proxies for documents.  As such, the information contained within the documents is not able to be queried effectively. But if the working papers were represented as global standard based knowledge graphs of information, they could act much more like databases.  Further, Lean Six Sigma techniques, principles, and practices can be effectively used to manage quality of these important artifacts.

Just as clay tablets had their time but where eventually replaced by papyrus and then paper; and paper had its time to eventually be replaced by what amounts to electronic paper; electronic paper will be replaced, in many cases, by semantic oriented model-based information artifacts which are machine readable and truly understandable by machine-based processes.

Just as disclosures are identifiable and can be given names, so too can accounting and audit working papers and schedules can be given names, identified, modified and extended, and such.  Best practices, good practices, emergent practices, and novel practices can all be addressed effectively.

Accounting and audit working papers and schedules are effectively blocks of information. Those blocks of information, which are machine readable, can be combined and rendered into human readable artifacts that look like and act like spreadsheets or documents. Think information Legos. (For more information see Atomic Design Methodology.)

Digital distributed ledgers will very likely play a role to further enhance this tool.


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