Digital Financial Reporting

Ledger is described in it's user manual as "fat free accounting". Per the user manual:

Fat-free accounting

Ledger is an accounting tool with the moxie to exist. It provides no bells or whistles, and returns the user to the days before user interfaces were even a twinkling in their father’s CRT.

What it does offer is a double-entry accounting journal with all the flexibility and muscle of its modern day cousins, without any of the fat. Think of it as the Bran Muffin of accounting tools.

Ledger is open source.  The application has been ported to numerous other languages. Here is the Ledger discussion group.

What would be incredibly interesting would be to map XBRL concepts to the chart of accounts and to add the roll forward transaction code (mentioned in Introduction to the Fact Ledger) to the general journal.  That way, rather than bolting XBRL on to the end of a process, you can put the metadata into the accounting system and let it flow through the system, leveraging it throughout the entire process.

Another accounting system I ran across when investigating Ledger is hledger. There is also a web version called hledger-web. You can download hledger here. hledger is open source. I downloaded it and did this basic example in about 10 minutes.

And so I modified my accounting process automation prototype, adding the plain text format.  Now, my record-to-report process is complete, including the accounting system.  My Microsoft Access database generates the plain text output.  I can both import into and export from my database, generate a complete XBRL-based financial report.  I will create an updated video soon!