Digital Financial Reporting

Harvard University, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, published The History of Artificial Intelligence, which is an excellent overview of AI.

There are a lot of other very interesting articles linked to from that main article.

I have written a simple software application in Microsoft Access that extracts the XBRL calculation relations (i.e. roll ups) of 5,734 10-K financial reports submitted to the SEC.  You can download the database and other tools if you want to analyze the roll up relations:

• Here is the database: This contains 807,924 roll up relations from the 5,734 reports.  It also has a list of the reporting entities.  The database also has the extraction code which should work if you have a Microsoft Access license.
• Documentation: This documentation helps you understand how to use the database.
• Excel extraction tool:  The database has ALL 5,734 reports.  This Excel tool can be used to extract XBRL calculation relations from one report at a time.  It can be modified to do more.

If you make any interesting modifications to the tools or discover any interesting patterns in the information, please be sure to let me know.

Here is more information related to those 5,734 US GAAP financial reports.

I have used the term semantic spreadsheet, cell store, spreadsheet hell, and have pointed out the problems of current approaches to working with spreadsheets.

I was introduced to a new term today, deductive spreadsheet or logical spreadsheet. Here is a set of slides that explain deductive spreadsheets and here is a book on the topic. Finally, here is an article from The Knowledge Engineering Review.  OK, so I found one more really good article about logical spreadsheets. This last article provides this definition of a logical spreadsheet:

A logical spreadsheet is a spreadsheet in which the formula language is composed of logical
expressions.

More to come.

The World Economic Forum published a 167 page report, The New Physics of Financial Services – How artificial intelligence is transforming the financial ecosystem, which you can download. (This is a direct link to the report.)

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the physics of financial services. It is weakening the bonds that have held together the component parts of incumbent financial institutions, opening the door to entirely new operating models and ushering in a new set of competitive dynamics that will reward institutions focused on the scale and sophistication of data much more than the scale or complexity of capital.

A clear vision of the future financial landscape will be critical to good strategic and governance decisions as financial institutions around the world face growing competitive pressure to make major strategic investments in AI and policy makers seek to navigate the challenging regulatory and social uncertainties emerging globally.

Building on the World Economic Forum’s past work on disruptive innovation in financial services, this report provides a comprehensive exploration of the impact of AI on financial services.

Wow!  That is all I can say right now.

Scratch, the popular software application created by MIT, provided a significant amount of inspiration for the expert system a software engineer and I built for creating financial reports.

While you could fiddle with some of the ideas of Scratch using the browser-based Blockly, also inspired by Scratch, you could not run what you create.

But now you can run what you create and do even more fiddling.  Scratch is now available as a browser-based application. Here are some videos that help you understand how to use Scratch.

Now, I speculate that most people will wonder what I am talking about and how Scratch relates to financial reporting.  But some will likely get what I am trying to point out.

No worries.  Ultimately you will be able to fiddle with real financial reports and then what I am trying to communicate will be more clear.  But, I cannot do that just now; we have a little more work to do with our application.