Digital Financial Reporting

As I have pointed out in the past, you need syntax rules, business domain semantics (or business logic) rules, and workflow or process rules to effectively exchange information.

Having figured out the syntax and business domain semantics pieces, I am not diving into workflow.

An excellent tool relating to workflow that I have discovered is the yED Graph Editor.  The reason the yED Graph Editor is so good is that (a) it is free, (b) it works on Windows and the Mac OS, and (c) it supports a couple of different standard workflow syntaxes.

Accountants are trained to understand workflow, document workflow, and read workflow documentation. However, accountants still tend to focus on human-readable workflow documentation and never really consider the idea of machine-readable workflow documentation.  This will change.

There are two workflows that I am focusing on currently.  The first is financial report creation workflow.  The second is accounting process workflow starting at the general ledger level.

More to come, so stay tuned.

Here is an online version of the yED Graph Editor.