Digital Financial Reporting

David Tuck wrote an interesting article, The Emancipation of Expert Knowledge. His premise is that today's professional services are expensive, antiquated, rigid, opaque, provide a primitive customer experience, and end up with dissatisfaction on both sides of a professional services transaction. David summarizes with this paragraph: (emphasis added by me)

The above are all flaws affecting the client due to the one-sidedness of today’s grand bargain. But that’s not to say that working in a professional service firm is a vocational utopia. The bargain is broken on both sides and there is much cause for professional dissatisfaction. The expensive fees frequently bring with them unreasonable client expectations that you feel compelled to bend over backwards to cater to. And whilst you develop immense intellectual capital as a professional, you don’t develop any of your own intellectual property.

David seems to be concluding that professional services should be a product rather than a service.

I agree with David.

And so how to you turn this expert knowledge which is being delivered as professional services into a product? How do you let professionals that develop expert knowledge own their intellectual property?

This is explained in detail in my paper Computational Professional Services. This is demonstrated in the working proof of concept expert system for creating financial reports a software engineer and I created called Pesseract. A framework is provided for effectively setting expert knowledge free in my method. You can see this working yourself by experimenting with Pacioli which is a rules/logic/reasoning engine that performs work and verifies information logic.  Or, try Luca or in a couple of weeks try the new cloud-based version of Luca.

Auditchain seems to add an additional important layer (or layers really) to everything that I have been doing for the past 20 years with regard to accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis. More on this later. Listen to this podcast to understand what Auditchain is up to.

Here is expert professional knowledge that I have represented in machine-readable form using the global standard XBRL: Financial Reporting Schemes XBRL-based Knowledge Graph. 

As I can best explain it; Auditchain is converting that information into NFTs which increases trust and provenance, using these NFTs within an incentivised gaming model, processing all this with their Pacioli rules/logic/reasoning engine, leveraging Merkle trees and Merkle proofs, storing things using immutable digital distributed ledgers in a blockchain, providing decentralized orchestration, and literally redefining how expert knowledge can be used in the financial accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis supply chain.

This could all provide a massive increase in efficiency if thousands or even millions of professionals can effectively share their expert knowledge using a machine-readable form and effectively collaborate with software engineers. This could be a new economy, a new platform for delivery of professional services. This video that relates to gaming, Economy of the Metaverse, helps one understand the possibilities here.

Double-entry accounting was built for this 600 years ago.  The way I see it, this is an example of a new way accountants can monetize their professional knowledge which serves an example for other groups of professionals that may also choose to set their expert knowledge free.