Rethinking Financial Reporting: the Model-driven Financial Statement
It is time to rethink the design of financial statements. Clay tablets worked well and they had a good run which ended many years ago when the clay tablets were replaced by papyrus and then ultimately paper. Paper had a good run also but paper financial statements were ultimately replaced by what amounted to an electronic version of that paper; PDF, HTML, and such. We can do better. Today's demands call for more modern accounting tools . Idealized design (a.k.a. greenfield project ) is the notion of designing a system without imposing constraints of prior work. This technique may, or may not, work for rethinking the financial statement. Here are a number of ideas that I would throw at the wall if I were in charge of rethinking the financial statement to make such tools modern: Digital first : The first thing that I would do is abandon the legacy notion of paper and the document and embrace what a financial statement really is; a database or knowledge graph. A fin...