Digital Financial Reporting

This is an excellent explanation of how blockchain works.  It has a video and web pages that you can fiddle with.

You can look at the etherum blockchain here. You can post to the chainthis blockchain here.

This video provides an excellent explanation of the sorts of things blockchain can be used for.

In the article, Why Everyone Missed the Most Important Invention in the Last 500 Years, author, futurist and thinker Daniel Jeffries argues that triple-entry accounting is the most important invention in 500 years. Here is a brief excerpt from Jeffries article:

Accounting: History’s Sexiest Subject

Here’s the thing: Without accounting, you wouldn’t be reading this article on your iPad, or driving to work in a new car or listening to music on Pandora. Without accounting there’s no commerce, no trade. Without commerce there would be no planes, no trains, no tractors, no steam engine, no skyscrapers or computers. There would be no nation states, no boats, no shipping containers traveling all over the world ferrying goods from the far corners of the Earth.

In fact, without accounting you’d still be subsistence farming or hunting in the forest.

You see, there’s only been two accounting breakthroughs in the entire history of the world before now.

So it seems that triple-entry accounting will be the third accounting breakthrough!  What do you think?

OpenFilings has provided what amounts to a complete system for making use of XBRL-based information. The system is called "Really Easy Converter from EXCEL to iXBRL" or RECEiX.  I added a few enhancements.

• Create: You can use this Excel applicationto create an Inline XBRL report. They even provide a handbook. (This is the same Excel spreadsheet in a ZIP archive)
• Repository: I added a mini repository of three files in the form of an RSS document.
• Extraction: You can use this Excel applicationto EXTRACT information from an Inline XBRL Report. (This is an Excel-based extractor that I created in a ZIP archive)

Now, is this the "be-all, end-all" implementation of XBRL?  No. Far from it.  This is pretty basic.  But, if you want to figure out how to roll-your-own solution, this has all the moving pieces.

Me, I am working to create a much more sophistocated system with a software developer. We are calling this working prototype we are using to test the feasibility of some things Pesseract. Our vision is an expert system for creating financial reports.  Our system is simply an enhancement of the three basic functions above.  This document, Computer Empathy, will help you understand our vision.

So the OpenFilings approach is one approach.  Pesseract is another, different approach.  Others will have additional approaches I am sure.