Trends in Financial Reporting
Thursday, February 20, 2020 at 08:58AM
Charlie in Digital Financial Reporting

Financial reporting will be different in the fourth industrial revolution. There seems to be a number of trends that are interacting with one another in the realm of financial reporting.  This is a summary of what I see:

Center to all of this is the financial report logical model, enabling a new modern approach to financial reporting.  Software interacts with that model to put things into a report, make sure the report is right, extract information from the report for analysis, etc. Machine-readable metadata glues everything together logically, enabling very significant automation.

Imagine a financial report (or business report for that matter) that combined all of these three characteristics/capabilities: 

  1. Nice formatting providing "eye candy" to humans.
  2. Inline XBRL providing human-readable details within that nicely formated document, plus fundamental machine-readability.
  3. Human readable details; current Inline XBRL viewers are OK, but there is a lot of room for improvement.  For example, seeing that all the mathematical computarions ticked and tied. A standard view of reported facts.

This video that explains how to turn gaseous "facts" into liquid "fact tables" and ultimately into human-readable renderings.

How is your digital maturity? Do you understand that this is more about people and organizational dynamics as contrast to simply technology?  How well do you understand artificial intelligence?  By one account, 81% of business leaders don't understand AI.  Do you have the "technology skills" people like the AICPA say you need?  Personally, I don't believe that you need technology skills; what you need is Computer Empathy.

Did I miss something?  Let me know.  Get the big picture here.

Article originally appeared on XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting (http://xbrl.squarespace.com/).
See website for complete article licensing information.