Digital Financial Reporting

By understanding the Essence of Accounting it is possible to understand likely futures of accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis.

Given that the CEO of IBM believes that every company will ultimately become "an AI company", that each of the Big 4 are telling their clients that the fourth industrial revolution is a thing and to pay attention to AI, and at least one of the Big 4 has provided a pretty good vision of what finance will look like in the future; significant change is pretty much a forgone conclusion.

But change to what?  Think human-machine collaboration. How exactly will all this artificial intelligence stuff work?  Well, no one really knows with certainty but there has been some significant experimentation; but I have placed my bet.

Fundamentally, accounting works like this: INPUT (journals) >> PROCESSING >> OUTPUT (report)

The basics of accounting can be explained using basic math and/or graph theory.  Complexity exists but that complexity comes in the form of explainable patterns.  With the complexities of the real world, it can look more like this:

If you understand the essence of accounting and you understand the essence of how computers work then all this stuff is actually pretty straight forward and easy to grasp.