The Financial
Data Platform

Numeric has this notion of "the financial data platform".  Numeric was recently introduced in a press release just a few days ago on September 22, 2026, Numeric Launches Financial Data Platform, the ERP Replacement Built for the Agent Era.  Also, a co-founder of Numeric posted a question on LinkedIn, "Is the Financial Data Platform an ERP?"

The purpose of this post is to help me get my head around what Numeric is, what a financial data platform is, to compare and contrast Numeric and the Accounting & Audit by Design Framework, and to otherwise get my head around what accounting is going to become and how the heck to get there effectively.

Here are some facts from the Numeric press release and a video from that financial data platform page.

This, a paragraph from the press release summarizes the problem of accounting pretty succinctly, "Historically, general ledgers were built to do one job well: produce GAAP-compliant financial statements. To do it, they compress a business event into debits, credits, memo lines and a handful of fields, discarding the context around the transaction. That structure dates to the era of paper ledgers, and it has survived intact through every generation of software built on top of it."

Restating that problem statement a bit; as I pointed out in a blog post a while back, Consequences of Starting at the End of the Chain, the problem is that accounting systems start with the financial transaction, not the business event which is where they should start.  What is needed is a business events journal, as I pointed out in another blog post, Business Events Ledger (I mistakenly used the term "ledger", I should have used "journal").

Numeric and myself are not the only ones to see this problem.  Bill McCarthy pointed out the notion of the business event in 1982 when he created Resources, Events, Agents (REA). Willi Brammertz also pointed out in 2013 with what he calls ACTUS which are the business events (called financial contracts) of financial institutions.  Dave McComb and Cheryl Dunn also recognize business events as the proper starting point in their book The Future of Accounting.  Accounting & Audit by Design Framework recognizes this as that framework embraces business events. RoboSystem.ai embraces this with their events ledger; see also Thesis Events before Entries. Finally,  the Theory of Accounting and Control (1997) embraces this idea but refers to business events as business contracts.

Here is a prototype representation of a business event. (This is a work in progress.)

The next fact that I will point out is this, "The Financial Data Platform is the first system to update accounting architecture for the age of agents. It stores each business event as a complete record instead, retaining the original source document and its metadata, with debits and credits as one projection of that record rather than the record itself. The result is closer to a data warehouse with accounting logic than a typical ERP."

So, I don't know if Numeric can say "first system".  But, I will give it to them because they are a commercially available system.  But I have been doing these projections for years, see Example Financial Statement Holon.  Also, my Record to Report working proof of concept does this also and several other software developers have achieved this capability including RoboSystems.ai.

In this LinkedIn post, provides a description of the notion of a financial data platform, saying,  "We call it the Financial Data Platform because that describes it best: the FDP ingests operational data from any source, turns it into financial data, and creates one unified financial graph intended to be as useful to the business as possible."  And then things get even cooler.

Next there is this statement in the press release, "Numeric is an operating engine." I can absolutely see this.  In the system I am contemplating, I refer to what appears to be the same thing as an "intelligence engine". Neuro-semantic artificial intelligence with human teaming.

Something I don't understand is the term financial data platform.  Why not enterprise information platform? Why not both financial information and nonfinancial information in the same platform?

Another thing I don't understand is why open global standards are not mentioned as far as I can see. For example, ISO/IEC Accounting and Economic Ontology are published standards for implementing business events. There are a boatload of standards yet Numeric does not seem to use the term standards ever as far as I have seen. Given that ultimately Numeric will have to generate reports and more and more reports are using XBRL and there is a published XBRL taxonomy for US GAAP, IFRS, and the GASB is working on GAS; seems like the word "standards" would be used somewhere.

An example of metadata that Numeric needs, or actually each of their customers need is the metadata for describing business events.  Why?  Well, it is business event information that goes into the compliance report.  If you understand financial statements, see Theory of the Financial Report Framework, then you know that a financial reporting framework specifies state and changes in state which is how information about business events is shown in a financial statement.  What, does Numeric expect every customer to create their own business event metadata?

Another example of metadata is the structures used to represent what is in electronic spreadsheets currently.  Or what; does Numeric contemplate that electronic spreadsheets are going to survive?  For more information on this see Structuring Systems into Discrete Stable Units.

Another example of metadata is audit evidence.  How does Numeric contemplate audits being done in the future.  This is what I think, see Audit Evidence Graph.

Another example is FP&A. For more information about that, see Modern Version of Ricordanze and Pacioli in the Computer Age.


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