Real-Time Data and Accounting
“The ideal is to move accountants out of the data aggregation business. With modern data markup languages and Internet tools, companies can make the raw transactions data available for anyone to analyze. In the spirit of open source software, analysts will aggregate the data into whatever form they find illuminating, and the market will then determine what statistical representations of the raw data are the most useful. The best statistics may vary from one type of business to another. The role of accounting will be to verify and expedite the process, to make sure that all the data are made accessible and that they are described correctly.”
—Richard Bookstaber, “A Demon of our own Design” (2007)
