Digital Financial Reporting

There is a method to my madness.  In the document Making the Case for Reporting Styles I am trying to tie together many things that might appear to be separate.  Here is the executive summary:

• Reporting styles is an example of the type of metadata that will drive the digital age of accounting, reporting, and auditing.
• Financial reports are not forms, but they are not random either.
• The fragments that make up a financial report can be distilled down to high-level patterns.
• One example of such high-level patterns is the reporting styles of the primary financial statements of public companies.
• The high-level patterns offer leverage helpful in both the creation of financial reports and the querying of information the reports contain.
• Software leveraging these high-level patterns can be constructed which is easier to use than software which does not leverage the patterns.
• The exercise of creating reporting styles for 100% of all public companies helps discover and correct accounting errors made by public companies and ambiguity in US GAAP.
• The reporting styles of the primary financial statements is only an example of high-level patterns; patterns exist within every disclosure also.
• The campaign to improve disclosure quality will do for the rest of the financial report what the reporting styles and fundamental accounting concepts did for the primary financial statements.
• While these ideas have been proven using US GAAP based financial reporting which is probably the most complex business reporting use case; other financial reporting schemes such as IFRS can likely use these ideas as can other business reporting use cases.

I am getting closer and closer to being able to effectively explain what I am trying to explain for probably 15 years now.  The first step is understanding it myself.

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