XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting

I have updated the MINI Financial Reporting Scheme.  This is the NEW VERSION for 2025 . Changes which were made include: Deleting about 8 stray terms which software had missed (i.e. report elements existed, but they were not used in any presentation relations). Create a pre-closing trial balance (to do). Fix transactions to handle subclassifications correctly (to do). Possibly add the concept "Dividends" (to do). Possibly add "Current Portion of Long Term Debt" report line item (to do). Add reference implementation using The World Online (TWO) sample company that has 22,000 general journal entries. Improve the type-subtype relations. Add dummy documentation and dummy authoritative references. Adjust the business events to leverage the DCA core events (in November, when the book comes out). Better sync with canonical accounting and audit working papers. New Chart of Accounts XBRL taxonomy . There are the current type-subtype relations: ( can see them here ) Additiona...

Burroughs build the first accounting machine  ( sales poster ) in about 1928. That has since been improved upon.  It is time for another improvement. To best understand the possibilities here, I would suggest reading the article  Using logic programming for theory representation and scientific inference . In another blog post I described the notion of what some people refer to as a "mindful machine". People use other terms to describe what I am talking about, but I like "mindful machine" which "smartens you up" and I am particularly interested in accountancy. By "accountancy" I mean accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis; external compliance reporting, internal management and cost reporting, tax reporting, and special purpose reporting; for profit, not-for-profit, state and local government reporting, federal financial reporting.  Basically, the full meal deal. There is a big difference between a line cook and a chef.  Similar to how a ch...

As I explain in this prior blog post about complexity ; a kludge is an engineering/computer science term that defines 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. The nautical term for a kludge is jury rig. By contrast, elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness, grace, and simplicity. Actions have consequences.  No action, inaction, is a type of action. While a new paradigm of accountancy is very likely inevitable;  Things like " starting at the end of the chain " and " semantic fragmentation " and the " integration hairball " that now exists were problems in the past and have resulted in many, too many, accountants being what amounts to " data janitors " and " transaction chasers "; they don't need to be problems going forward. But what modern accountancy will look like, while pretty ...

Logica is an open-source, declarative logic programming language based on Datalog which is designed for data manipulation and analysis. Logica is held out to be "modern logic programming". Logica was developed at Google as a successor to Yedalog .  Yedalog, also based on Datalog, aims to address perceived usability limitations of SQL. So, Logica and Yedalog both belong to the Datalog "family". Logic programming is a declarative programming paradigm based on formal logic where the program is written as a set of logical statements. Logic programming was developed in the 1960s. Prolog and Datalog are the most prominent examples of logic programming languages. LISP is another approach to logic programming. Answer Set Programming (ASP) is another approach to logic programming.  Datalog is the logic used by relational databases.  Datalog is a subset of first order logic that can safely be processed by computer based processes because it avoids logical paradoxes which...

The paper, Society of Minds: The Architecture of  Mindful Machines , proposes a new architectural paradigm for building what they call Mindful Machines. The paper says that the architecture addresses the core limitations of today's AI which include opacity, brittleness, and misalignment with human values. Fundamentally, the objective of Mindful Machines is to turn machines that compute into machines that comprehend. The paper provides this definition of a mind: “A mind is a coherent module with reasoning, memory, and self-regulation, unlike an agent, which may only perform tasks.”  Imagine a human and an artificial mind interacting within a single common ecosystem. That common ecosystem creates a shared conceptualization  and has  theories , knowledge, reasoning, governance (i.e. curation, checks and balances, scrutiny).  Knowledge is discernable because it is clearly specified. Knowledge is testable so that agreement can be confirmed.  Knowledge is extensi...

Logical English (LE) is a controlled natural language which is written in English sentences and those sentences can be translated into logic programming languages such as Prolog , Datalog , or Answer Set Programming .  Note that logic programming can be effectively converted to other programming approaches . Now, imagine a dialect of Logical English specific to Accountancy.  Accountancy has it's on jargon.  Accounting is the language of business .  Basically, the Logical English Dialect for Accountancy would be (a) a more restricted set of Logical English and (b) supplemented with additional specific terms necessary to work effectively in the area of knowledge called accountancy.  This language and terminology is aligned with ISO/IEC Accounting and Economic Ontology , XBRL International's Open Information Model (OIM), OMG's Standard Business Report Model (SBRM), and my Seattle Method . All of this is coordinated and the atomic design methodology is used to ...

Fuzzy logic  is a way of thinking that allows for degrees of truth rather than simply black-and-white answers like TRUE or FALSE when using Boolean logic (a.k.a. Boolean algebra ).  Fuzzy logic is an approach to handling the "shades of gray" type situations that exist where information might be incomplete, vague, or have some level of subjectivity. For example, in my subject matter of accountancy you have the notion of "audit risk".  The notion of audit risk is subjective.  Using fuzzy logic you can get a computer based system to provide useful information when it comes to working with information such as the notion of audit risk. With fuzzy logic you have a set of tools that enable software to interact appropriately with information in a known, understandable way.  Using fuzzy logic you can have things like: Fuzzy sets : Using normal set theory, membership in a set is black or white.  But with fuzzy sets you can have "degrees of membership" of a set. Lin...

This blog post summarizes information related to the creation of a budget using a model-driven approach.  Here is the fundamental information. The budget will be created using the MINI 2023 financial reporting scheme . Here is the first iteration of the budget, effectively a "template" which will be modified to create the budget: Monthly budget for first year Luca Suite Basic Viewer Inline XBRL Raw XBRL Report Model XBRL Formula (math rules) Five year annual budget Luca Suite Basic Viewer Inline XBRL Raw XBRL  (will load in Pesseract) Report Model XBRL Formulas (math rules) Download IMPORT Files and Report in Excel Video that walks you through initial budget template model Video that walks you through fact verification Video that walks you through editing of report model The budget can be created but the creator MUST NOT violate any of the rules.  Here are some of the rules that MUST NOT be violated: Fundamental accounting concepts  (i.e. you MUST have a balance sh...

Luca Pacioli (1445–1517) was a Renaissance polymath and a close friend of Leonardo da Vinci and widely regarded as the father of modern accounting.  What might his recordkeeping methods have looked like if Luca Pacioli had access to modern information technologies? In their article, Pacioli in the Computer Age: Back to the Future of Accounting and Risk , Willi Brammertz and Allan I. Mendelowitz point out the consequences of starting at the end of the chain when you implement accounting processes. While Brammertz and Mendelowitz focus on banks in their article, the same ideas are true for all businesses, large and small. Current accounting systems tend to focus on generating a balance sheet and an income statement, the debits and the credits.  By starting with the debit/credit problem first, entering financial transactions; when the  IT world computerized accounting they basically started at the "end of the chain" rather than at the beginning of the chain where they r...