Pacioli Power User Tool

Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 07:31AM
Charlie in Digital Financial Reporting

Auditchain is creating Pacioli which is a PROLOG based logic/rules/reasoning engine specifically tuned for scrutinizing and otherwise working with XBRL-based financial reports.  One interface for that software application is this:

Pacioli Power User Tool (To log in, click on the colorful icon on the right.)

See also these training resources. 

• DOW 30 FAC Verification
• States (see documentation)
• Method (see documentation)
• ACME example (very large report, lots of rules)
• Microsoft Financial Report Knowledge Graph
• XBRL-based Financial Reports Submitted to SEC using US GAAP, Fundamental Accounting Concept Relations Verification
• Adding and manipulating information
• Importing report information (Example import files you can use: Accounting Equation, SFAC6, Proof)
• XBRL Technicalities
• XULE and PROLOG (Get more information about XULE here)

More information coming soon.  Keep watchining this page.

For viewing XBRL-based financial reports, you might want to consider trying Pesseract.

Why PROLOG for processing XBRL-based financial reports? As I have pointed out, XBRL formula processors have specific defeciencies in functionality. They simply don't have the necessary capabilities.  There are other alternatives to processing knowledge graphs. Fundamentally, XBRL-based financial reports are knowledge graphs.

PROLOG fits particularly well this challenge, because it provides "out of the box" (in addition to the ISO PROLOG standard core) a number of important key features: 

• Relational paradigm addresses tabular data (e.g. RDBMS) while optimised support for recursive code addresses tree and graph data (e.g. graph DBs, RDF) (note that at its foundation, XBRL also follows the relational paradigm)
• Basic logic engine already built-in.
• Extensive meta programming capabilities, handy for formula evaluation.
• Flexible parser, facilitating friendlier syntaxes.
• Builtin search and tree matching.
• Very efficient C-based engine, with RAM usage an order of magnitude under the alternatives.
• Vast open source API libraries, including XML and semantic web processing processing.
• Mature implementation, consolidating over 3 decades of optimisation and refinement in the fields of logic programming and cognitive artificial intelligence.
• Recent features for smoothier integration with other languages and to build Domain Specific Languages.

You can find a more comprehensive list of PROLOG advantages here, and a related business view perspective here.

Article originally appeared on XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting (http://xbrl.squarespace.com/).