Rethinking the Basics of Financial Reporting by Timo Elliott.
From the post:
The chart of accounts is one of the fundamental building blocks of finance – but it’s time to rethink it from scratch.
To organize corporate finances and track financial health, traditional financial systems typically use complex, rigid general ledger structures. The result is painful, unwieldy systems that are not agile enough to support the requirements of modern finance.
In the financial engines of the future, rigid “code block” architectures are eliminated, replaced by flexible in-memory structures. The result is a dramatic increase in the flexibility and speed general ledger entries can be stored and retrieved. Organizations can vastly simplify their chart of accounts and minimize or eliminate time-consuming and complex reconciliation, while retaining virtually unlimited flexibility to report on any business dimension they choose.
Tim’s point is quite sound.
Except that we all face the same “…complex, rigid general ledger structures.” None of us has an advantage over another in that regard.
Once we have the information in hand, we can and do create more useful representations of the same data, but current practice gets everyone off to an even start.
Or evenly disadvantaged if you prefer.
As regulators start to demand reporting that takes advantage of modern information techniques, how will “equality” of access be defined?