Digital Financial Reporting

PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) with it's new product InsitesOfficer provides bookkeeping services.

My question is: why not connect automated financial reporting to the bookkeeping? Then you would have continuous accounting and reporting.  Then, why not also connect audit to the bookkeeping and reporting?

PWC seems to be building out a new digital audit platform. However, they don't mention anything such as rules engines or rules creation software.  True Comply seems to be doing some rules based stuff. Here is a full list of products PWC offers.

Ah, here is information about what PWC is calling Aura which is for financial statement audit.

What if PWC connected more of these things together into one workflow.

The University of Michigan and the City of Flint, Michigan are partnering to undertake an XBRL-based financial reporting project.  Read more here.

Also note this paper, An Open Data Standard for Local Government Financial Reporting: How it Could Work in Michigan.

The following is a list of five things that every student that is studying accounting should understand. 

1. Accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis is going through what one recent accounting PhD graduate called a once in 500 year change. This change is not only inevitable, it is imminent.
2. This change is a paradigm shift and you cannot use the same mental map used to understand accounting for the past 40 years to understand what will be going on during the next 40 years.
3. There are far more people who do not understand this change than there are that do understand the change.  Neither overstating nor understating the magnitude of the change is helpful.  Your college professors and your supervisors when you start your first job will most likely not understand the change that is occurring.
4. Accounting was the world's first communications technology and change is not new to accounting.  In fact, the CPA code of ethics says that accountants are supposed to improve the profession and the institution of accountancy.  Be the accountant that changed the world.
5. Accounting is important.  Accounting is a tool.  Tools can be used in different ways.  Accounting is an excellent profession that has been around for 7,000 years will always exist and will be a lot less grueling and monotonous because automation is going to take over many repetitive tasks of humans, leaving them to perform the important tasks that computers cannot perform.

It is said that the best way to predict the future is to create it.  If you want to help create the future of accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis then read Essence of Accounting and Financial Report Knowledge Graphs.  Follow the bread crumbs provided by the footnotes.

A lot of people say they use agile software development methodology but few actually do.  Check out the Agile Software Developement Manefesto and the principles behind the Agile Manefesto.  If you are a business professional, you should software developers to these standards.  If you are a software engineer, you should consider following these Agile principles.

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