XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting

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 : 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

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...