Smart Financial Statement

When I started as an auditor in 1982, the way a financial statement was created was that a typing pool in a room would type the statement into a word processor; I don't remember if we had laser, they may have been typed on on a type writer.

Those in the typing pool who did the typing knew little or nothing about financial statements; they simply typed what was on a piece of paper.

Word Perfect and then later Microsoft Word changed that. Now the process is very much different yet it is also very much the same.  Financial statements are still documents and the software application, the word processor, knows nothing about the financial statement that it is being used to create.

Others continue to create make incremental improvements to the same old paradigm, a document oriented paradigm.  Artificial intelligence will struggle to use that traditional paradigm. Financial statements would work better as databases, rather than documents.

I personally am personally completely rethinking the financial statement "container". This blog post, Rethinking Financial Reporting: The Model-Driven Financial Statement, is what I am thinking.

What if the application used to create a financial report actually understood financial reports.  What if the tool used for creating financial reports was a knowledge based system. What if that knowledge based system could interpret financial statement mechanics and dynamics. How could that be possible? Well, it is very possible.  All you need to do is create a machine-readable theory that a knowledge based system could interpret.

I am thinking an industrial strength tool specifically for professional accountants, auditors, and  analysts. A mindful machine specially made for accountancy.

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