XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting

This article by Nicolas Figay,  When Knowledge Graphs Fail, It's Not the Ontology — It's the Epistemology* , is spot on.  It is critically important for business professionals to understand the following notions. First, toward the end of the article, the following statement is made, " Completeness is not produced by reasoning — it must be declared or governed. " That statement is spot on. As I have tried to point out in  articles I have written , there needs to be a conscious matching between possible perturbances and control.  This is the Law of Requisite Variety . Full stop. Second, there is a difference between " data ", " information ", and " knowledge ".  Most people seemed to be mentally locked in the world of data.  But that is not where you want to be.  You want to be working with information because you can use information to create knowledge; data will not get you where you want to be. Third, I never could really get my head aro...

The Future of Accounting is a forthcoming book by Dave McComb and Cheryl Dunn.  This is worth checking out. "This book ushers in a sea change in the practice of accounting and the implementation of accounting systems. We are not tweaking the status quo. This book is the product of rethinking accounting from first principles. This is what accounting would look like if we designed it anew, based on what has been learned in information systems over the last 50 years." Additional Information : The Future of Audit: What Will Audit Firms Look Like in 2030? Seattle Method Overview Building a Mindful Machine for Accountancy Brainstorming a Collaborative Work System for Reporting and Audit Teams Rethinking Financial Reporting: the Model-driven Financial Statement Financial Statement and Audit Quality Understanding Model-driven Standards based Semantic-oriented AI-powered Financial Reporting Understanding Global Open Industry Standards Based Model-driven Semantic-oriented Artificial I...

In my view, the currently employed work systems used by a reporting team to generate a financial statement and by an audit team to perform and audit of a financial statement that has been generated should be completely destroyed (i.e. use the approach of idealized design ) and reconstituted.  Alternatively, currently employed systems might be supplemented or augmented to include additional new capabilities.  These new capabilities would take the following form: A model-driven approach  similar to XBRL-based digital financial reports as opposed to the current document oriented approach to creating accounting and audit working papers and schedules Global open standards based rather than proprietary Semantic oriented " things " as contrast to strings Software allows for the creation of and enforcement of good and best practices and canonical templates and leveraging standard work approaches Open-core model  software shared by all accounting and audit firms (i.e. proprie...