Modern Version of Ricordanze

The condition of today's accounting information systems is that of a chance product driven over the last fifty years by a continuous sequence of requirements to meet the immediate needs of an enterprise. The result is describe as a "software wasteland". An "integration hairball". A kludge that gets the job done, sort of.  There are gaps.  There is fragmentation. Bucket brigades are needed to connect things together. And this has been normalized.

Effectively, current accounting information systems are based on the knee-jerk reaction of IT folks implementing software to satisfy the immediate need of an enterprise; and so what you have is an accumulation of “stuff”, a chance product, which an accumulation of incremental adjustments.

What if a different approach were used?  What if, rather than a chance product, a conscious and deliberate designed effort was used to create industrial processes which were scalable? What if the fundamental characteristics of accounting were leveraged?

Luca Pacioli described what he considered double-entry accounting best practices in his Summa de arithmetica in 1494.  Conventions such as "debits on the left, credits on the right".  Best practices such as the use of Arabic numerals instead of Roman Numerals.  Accounting artifacts formally defined including the journal and the ledger.

Another seemingly forgotten artifact described by Pacioli was the Ricordance.  The Ricordance was described in the article, Pacioli in the Computer Age: Back to the Future of Accounting and Risk, and in more detail in the paper, Pacioli in the Computer Age.

(Note that sometimes "Ricordance" is used, other times "Ricordanze", and sometimes "Recordance" is used. I am going to standardize on "Ricordanze".) 

As I point out speaking of the Ricordanze on this blog post, Pacioli in the Computer Age, I suggest that, "Ultimately, this approach transforms accounting from a backward-looking exercise into a forward-looking tool for comprehensive institutional management."

In the past I have used the term "business events ledger" to describe what I am trying to get to.  It was suggested to me that a better term might be "Semantic Ricordanze Plane".  Further, there is some dispute as to what the Ricordanze actually was.  The terms "Ricordanze", "Pacioli's Ricordanze", and "Merchant's Ricordanze" were all used and seemed to describe different things.  As such, I am taking some liberties and evolving Pacioli's notion of the Ricordanze to a new, modern version.

Allow me to describe what I mean.

The Semantic Ricordanze Plane is effectively a formal mathematical structure known as a manifold in the branch of mathematics known as topology.  Into that manifold goes all of the business events, as described by the Resources, Events, Agents (REA) model of accounting.  Note that REA is the basis for ISO/IEC Accounting and Economic Ontology.  REA is similar to The Theory of Accounting and Control.  The idea of both REA and the Theory of Accounting and Control is that an enterprise is a set of "business events" or "set of contracts" and  that financial transactions are spawned from those business events/sets of contracts. Going forward, I will use the term business events. ACTUS, which is part of FIBO and on the way to becoming an ISO/IEC standard and Data Centric Accounting (DCA) as explained by The Future of Accounting both enrich REA.

The Semantic Ricordanze Plane is first a designed logical conceptualization of reality, two aspects of the triangle of meaning. That conceptualization of reality can then be turned into a representation (a.k.a. implementation) per an enterprise's preferred technology stack.

The Semantic Ricordance Plane is effectively a ledger of business events.  A ledger, not a list. In addition each business event is a holon and the Semantic Ricordance Plane itself is both a holon and a manifold. The Semantic Ricordance Plane is a computational substrate grounded in formal mathematics theory.

Business events are a foundational data layer that accounting has always needed but never truly had available to work with. Business events are where financial accounting transactions begin.  The current condition of accounting information systems occur as a result of not starting at the beginning of the chain (i.e. the business events); rather, current accounting systems started with the financial transactions instead.

The Semantic Ricordanze Plane fixes this condition.

Instead of beginning with journal entries or account balances, the Semantic Ricordanze Plane starts at the actual business events that give rise to financial transactions; each event is captured with its full operational context, resources, agents, and economic effects. This shift reframes accounting from a system that reacts to aggregated transactions into a system that models reality at its source.

This approach has been described as the "frozen raindrop approach". To “freeze each raindrop” is to record every atomic economic event as its own object, with its own resources, agents, commitments, policies, and dualities; not a journal entry, not a batch, not a ledger posting. Nothing is aggregated at this step. All aggregations are "downstream" and are projections, also holons, of the atomic objects. Every downstream journal, ledger, trial balance, lead schedule, working paper, audit schedule, financial statement, analysis model is a projection where possible.

The Semantic Ricordanze Plane is a global oriented immutable digital ledger.  Nothing is ever deleted. If a business event is nullified; that nullification is another business event. The audit trail is persisted.  Traceability and trackability is persisted. By being global oriented as contrast to local oriented; integration issues are resolved from the beginning by design.

Obviously not all information flows through accounting information systems. But, all additional information introduced in order to achieve a downstream result is not a document; rather new information is injected using digital information organisms which are machine interpretable graphs which can be projected into human readable documents when necessary.

Each "frozen raindrop" in the global oriented immutable digital ledger that is the Semantic Ricordanze Plane is, well, semantic.  Information is not a text string value of a field in a database table that is devoid of meaning. That meaning is governed.  Epistemic risk is consciously managed. The objective is to create a virtuous cycle (a.k.a. reinforcing loops, positive feedback loops, causal chain, defensible loop). Feedback from the system enables improvements to the system.  Accountants, auditors, and analysts are the curators of the system.

The Semantic Ricordanze Plane is both artificial intelligence ready and audit ready by design. Semantic fragmentation and physical fragmentation is eliminated.

The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of an enterprise provides this single version of the truth to other information systems which feed the Semantic Ricordanze Plane.  All other systems are required to resolve to or reconcile to this master copy of the truth. It is a database that, when queried, always provides consistent answers.  It is deterministic.

Much semantic fragmentation is self inflicted,  typically unknowingly.  A poorly designed chart of accounts. Missing metadata that makes it impossible to easily aggregate financial statement line items for the cash flow statement and statement of changes in equity. Ambiguity. Lack of clarity.  Using electronic spreadsheets to interject missing information later in the process because it was not entered earlier in the process. Broken processes which cause downstream remediation to fix mistakes or even more expensive effort to deal with the ramifications of failures such as providing incorrect compliance related information to a regulator unknowingly.

Because everything in the Semantic Ricoranze Plane is digital; quality control techniques such as Lean Six Sigma and Agile can be easily employed to monitor tasks, processes, and workflows.  Techniques such as Lean Six Sigma Poka Yoke mistake proofing can be employed.

Business professionals curate this system and configure it.  No coding is necessary.  Business rules are declarative and maintained by business professionals.  While integrations are created at the "atomic" level because of multiple different technical implementation alternatives; everything that  business professionals deal with is at the logical level at which they work.  This is achieved by leveraging the Atomic Design Methodology.

Every financial transaction is the result of a business event, yet traditional systems fail to record the rich, semantic event information needed to correctly classify, aggregate, and trace those transactions into complete financial statements. Without this metadata, systems cannot reliably generate cash flow statements or statements of changes in equity; nor can they support true traceability/trackability or provenance across the reporting chain. The Semantic Ricoranze Plane solves this by acting as an intelligent, multidimensional substrate—appending standardized event codes and operational mappings to each transaction, enabling the automatic generation of a full set of primary financial statements, and ensuring semantic consistency across the entire reporting manifold.

The relevance of this Semantic Ricordanze Plane to the future of accounting information systems is profound. By “starting at the beginning” rather than retrofitting missing data later using electronic spreadsheets, this Semantic Ricordanze Plane becomes the authoritative, single source of truth from which journals, ledgers, trial balances, lead schedules, and financial statements are derived. It aligns perfectly with REA’s event centric architecture, preserving operational detail while still supporting traditional double entry views. It also creates a graph first, machine interpretable environment where AI can operate on clean, structured, contextualized data rather than the “messy” and disconnected transactional silos that limit automation today.

In short, the Semantic Ricordanze Plane is not just another ledger; it is the technological resurrection of accounting's foundational Ricordanze. It is the conceptual and technical pivot that transforms accounting into a proactive, intelligence driven system. It provides one coherent version of the truth, maximizes traceability and audit readiness, and forms the backbone of future digital reporting architectures where financial statements are simply derived projections of a unified, semantic event graph.

All of this enables a new deliberate approach which is referred to as Accounting & Auditing by Design (A&AD) framework. A&AD resolves these inefficiencies, designed to industrialize the assurance process into a scalable, repeatable pipeline. New types of work systems can be created using new platforms and ecosystems. Effective human-machine teaming can be enabled. The Office of the CFO can be effectively refactored. Agentic AI can be effectively employed. A framework exists for implementing this in any enterprise, big or small.

Image from Wikipedia.

Additional Information:

• 3rd International Conference on Auditing and Artificial Intelligence - 2026
• Pacioli's Forgotten Book: The Merchant's Ricordanze
• Pacioli's forgotten book: The Merchant's Ricordanze
• Simplifying complexity: Rabobank’s IT transformation
• Ledger
• The Accounting Manifold
• Business Events Ledger
• Financial Statement is a Formal Semantic Structure
• Enterprise Reference Atlas
• A&AD: Going Concern Onboarding Pipeline
• My Garden