Digital Financial Reporting

I am a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The AICPA is a professional organization of certified public accountants and has approximately 418,000 members in 143 countries currently. 

Each week or so we get an "AICPA News Update".  The update provides information on news important to the profession.

Today, this is how that AICPA News Update started of:

Technology has undoubtedly been the catalyst for change throughout history. But today, this change is happening faster than ever before. The world will look very different in a few years - and the accounting profession is no exception. Artificial intelligence, blockchain and other technologies are poised to reshape the accounting landscape, and we need to be ready.

The AICPA News Update goes on to reference a Journal of Accountancy article for the month of July 2017, Real talk about artificial intelligence and blockchain.

Interestingly, I published my own article with a similar message in late June, Accounting and Auditing in the Digital Age.  My article provides more and better details that explain the change that is about to occur and helps professional accountants understand how to "be ready" as suggested by the AICPA News Update.

About a year ago the CFA Institute made a paper available calling for broader and deeper use of structured data and stated that accountants and auditors needed additional training.

Don't make the all-to-common mistake that most professional accountants make which is to try and understand the change that is about to occur from your current perspective.  That will not work.  Most professional accountants, most business professionals really, did not receive the appropriate training in college that would enable them to get their heads around what is about to happen.

You do not need to join the "learn to code hysteria".  In fact, most professional accountants don't need to learn that much about technology, maybe a little and if you learned a lot you would have an advantage for certain tasks. Some professional accountants will need to learn more than others, but not the typical professional accountant.

My advise is to start by reading the article above, Accounting and Auditing in the Digital Age.  Stay tuned to this blog also.  While for the last 10 or so years this blog related to figuring out how to tame the XBRL beast.  Going forward, I will provide more information useful to the average professional accountant, particularly CPAs and CAs.

The Journal of Accountancy, the trade magazine of certified public accountants, published the article Real talk about artificial intelligence and blockchain this month.  Here is on excerpt from that article:

"Technology is poised to transform the accounting profession. Artificial intelligence, robotics, and blockchain are on the verge of automating many traditional core CPA tasks. The profession is at a critical moment, one from which it will emerge in a far different form."

Like I have said, this stuff is going main stream.  One of the panelists sort of makes the right connection between AI and XBRL, but not that clearly.

Clearly I agree with the Journal of Accountancy.  I published a similar article a few days earlier, Accounting and Auditing in the Digital Age.  My article goes into more detail and makes the role XBRL plays in this paradigm shift more clear.  I also explain what CPAs should be doing now to stay on top of these changes.

 I have made some revisions to my Digital Financial Reporting Manifesto.  I tried to simplify the document, fixed some typos, and updated a few things.

This Digital Financial Reporting Manifesto  is intended to help professional accountants and other business professionals to contemplate, discuss, otherwise think about, and ultimately understand why and that an option should exist to express a general purpose financial report digitally.  We need digital financial reports to do accounting and auditing in the digital age.