Digital Financial Reporting

The accounting bots are coming!  The following two companies have been pointed out to me over the last couple of days:

• Pilot: "Pilot takes care of your bookkeeping from start to finish so you can focus 100% on making your business succeed." (These guys have raised $60 million in funding.)
• Botkeeper: "Better than humans, better than machines. Automated bookkeeping with a human touch."
• FirmAI: "FirmAI is a centralised repository of current and experimental business intelligence tools (BITs). Any tool that advances business automation is simply called a BIT; this includes among others, machine learning, econometric, statistical and decision optimising tools."
• Georges: "Launched an accounting automation platform SAAS that promises to allow businesses to “operate without an accountant thanks to a caring team”.

So what are these accounting bots really capable of?  This article, Will Bots Eventually Take The Jobs Of Accountants & Bookkeepers?, helps you understand why you should care and what you should do.  This article by Deloitte, The Robots are Coming, is where that first article gets some of its graphics.

How do these bots relate to XBRL?  Well, first of all; I suspect that neither of the two companies above, Pilot or Botkeepeer, (a) are aware of XBRL or (b) leverage anything that XBRL offers.  That is what I suspect.  I will find out if I am right or wrong.

What does XBRL provide that might provide leverage to people creating bots?  Well, first the accounting bots need to be putting the right information into the ledgers.  As I point out in the document, General Ledger Trial Balance to External Financial Report, ultimately that information ends up in a financial report.

Also, Andrew Nobel and I acquaint you to the notion of a "fact ledger" in the document Introducing the Fact Ledger.  We point out that if you do put a bit of additional information in a general ledger, you can automate the creation of the primary financial statements from the general ledger.

As I point out in Accounting Process Automation Using XBRL, a financial report contains "branches" and "leaves".  The GL accounts are the leaves, an XBRL taxonomy can provide the branches.  Together the leaves and branches are used to create a report.

Accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis are not separate things.  They are one thing and should not bee looked at as individual silos.  True automation is automating the entire process.  The metadata crosses over between those separate tasks.  If the right information is entered in the beginning and then flows throughout the process, true automation can be achieved.

That will help us arrive at DFIN's vision, Deloitte's vision, Blackline's vision, Auditchain's vision, the CFA Institute's vision, the SEC's vision, etc.  All those visions have one thing in common: the general purpose financial report.

What is important to tie all of this together?  Well, the first step is to recognize that these are not separate silos.  Second, you need to understand how computers work in order to understand their true capabilities and how to harness those capabilties to perform work.