In the third segment of a Conversation with Rakesh Kant, an expert on financial and reporting systems, in Lucknow, India, April 15, 2018, we discuss that reporting requires that large amounts of data have to be reduced to something understandable to a human.

As I have noted elsewhere, every answer to a reporting problem must fit in a spreadsheet–in fact in a small portion of the spreadsheet.  That’s because people can only comprehend so much data.

But much of our financial reporting involves accumulating large amounts of data to get to those high-level, aggregated results.  This dichotomy challenges our financial reporting systems.  They can be programmed to automatically create a set of things we want to analyze; but that set rarely includes the answers to every question we can imagine.

This is Episode 169 of Conversations with Kip, the best financial system vlog there is. Literally learn more–about ledgers and financial systems–at LedgerLearning.com.