Digital Financial Reporting

Steven M. Bragg, CPA, author of GAAP Guidebook (which is an excellent resource) publishes a series of podcasts related to accounting topics, The Accounting Best Practices Podcast.

Here is one podcast example, Bragg's Laws of Accounting.

Here is a podcast on XBRL, XBRL Tagging.

Here is a podcast on Artificial Intelligence: How AI might impact the accounting department.

The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) announced that they are adopting XBRL for utilities reporting.  See the final rule for more information.

Populous is ready to disrupt the multi-trillion dollar discounting industry using XBRL. They provide a lot of information on their web site, including this.

In an article, Surety Data Standards: Is Manual Data Entry Dead?, NASBP says "We’re hammering the final nail in the coffin of manual data entry... more to come."

NASBP says, "The gruesome (and grueling) days of painful re-keying of data may be coming to an end. Could data standards be the magic bullet?"

The article says:

"In 2017, The Hartford successfully brought standardized WIP reports into their internal financial management system, reducing WIP report processing from 20 minutes to 3 seconds. And earlier this year, two more software providers enabled their applications to prepare XBRL-formatted WIPs. Crowe LLP introduced a unique application to automatically build XBRL-formatted WIP reports along with other financials."

XBRLogic says it can automatically generate a normalized financial report in 2 minutes.

Are you toiling in the salt mines of data entry? Not me.  I am brainstorming how to build the modern finance platform.  There are already commercially available tools for accounting process automation, continuous accounting, smart close, and finance transformation. Managing the workflow of those tasks can also be managed with things like close process management.  Personally, I have better things to do with my time that toil in salt mines.

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Here is an example surety report.

Here is a press release.

The Innovators Dilemma points out the difference between an sustaining or incremental innovation and a disruptive innovation.

• Sustaining technologies which foster improved product performance. (improves a current business model)
• Disruptive technologies which result in worse product performance in the short term, but then over the long term they bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. (attacks current business models with lower cost business models)

This article references a Harvard Business Review article which points out the difference between a disruptive technology and a foundational technology.

• Foundational technologies create new foundations for economic and social purposes.

Foundational technologies have two dimensions that need to be considered: novelty and complexity.

The more novel the technology is, the more effort needed to ensure users understand the problems the new technology solves.  The higher the number of parties and the diversity of parties that have to work together to work together to produce a new solution, the more complexity is involved in making that product available.

The Harvard Business Review article points out how foundational technologies take hold; see the section How Foundational Technologies Take Hold in the article.  They point out a matrix that compares the dimensions of novelty and complexty, the four intersections in the matrix are:

• Low Novelty, Low Complexity: Single Use
• High Novelty, Low Complexity: Localization
• Low Novelty,  High Complexity: Substitution
• High Novelty, High Complexity: Transformation