Digital Financial Reporting

As pointed out by Mike Willis when with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, financial disclosures are not novel art projects akin to how highly skilled craftsmen assembled cars by hand prior to Henry Ford’s innovations that include the assembly line and standardization of parts.

This might come as a big surprise to most accountants, perhaps even shock.  The term "generally accepted accounting principles" (GAAP) is used for a reason.  Using the terminology of the Cynefin Framework, I would suspect that 80% of external financial disclosures follow "best practices", about 18% follow "good practices", perhaps 1.8% are "emergent practices" and maybe .2% are "novel practices".

Further, the average accountant is, well, average.  My 10 years of creating XBRL taxonomies for financial reporting using US GAAP and IFRS included meeting many, many accountants who provided input as to what should be in those XBRL taxonomies.  The discussions which took place were enlightening.  Accountants, just like everyone else, make mistakes.

What I predict the future will bring is heavy use of templates and exemplars for creating financial disclosures.  Here is a prototype of a template gallery that I created.  Here is another prototype. Works similar to how templates work for, say, Microsoft PowerPoint or Word.  This just makes a lot of sense.

Financial reports are far more consistent than you might think. Don't take my word for it, have a look at all those reports in the EDGAR system. The AICPA publishes a book, Best Practices in Presentation and Disclosure.  PPC's Guide to Preparing Financial Statements which is published by Thompson Reuters is a similar guide.

Besides, forget about public companies for a moment.  Think about the smaller accounting firms and the millions of companies creating financial reports. Think of that bell shaped curve.  Mistakes are made.  Templates and best practices guides help avoid mistakes.

Today, these guides are readable only by humans.  Soon, this best practices and good practices guidance will also be readable by machines.  That information will be used to gulde expert systems for creating financial reports.