This week’s episode likens our powerful financial systems to the powerful locomotives of the early 20th Century. Powerful Railroad Engines In my semi-biographical textbook “Balancing Act: A Practical Approach to Business Event Based Insights” I described the powerful railroad engine pictured in the video: “When I was living in Sacramento a couple of times during lunch I went over to the California State Railroad Museum … Continue reading Powerful Railroad and Processing Engines

This week’s video makes an outlandish prediction: that in the future companies will not have general ledgers, but instead use the increased compute capacities available from today’s ubiquitous computers to maintain much more granular ledgers, which have the GL perspective embedded in them. With all my experience with enterprise-wide financial reporting systems, I recognize how radical this idea is. And it’s not just the demise … Continue reading Outlandish Prediction: Demise of the G/L

Often discussions with others result in going back to the basic principle I talked about the relationship of the Data Warehouse to the General Ledger. That discussion focused on activity, the thing that creates journal entries. Today’s video builds on that but focuses on the balances. In the operational source systems, we typically make balances of some kind. Can one can accumulate all the balances … Continue reading Do Sub-Ledger Balances Add Up to GL Balances?

On a large project one time a CFO had heard something about troubles in the project developing from using a “fully normalized data model” and asked me what that meant, and why it created problems. I had an idea of how to explain it in a simple way that would make sense to anyone who has worked with multiple tabs of a spreadsheet. Scope of … Continue reading Data Models Matter in Financial Reporting

This week’s episode discusses Financial Auditing, and why it is important to financial reporting; it is the quality assurance process. Any metric engine or report process should have some method to test quality of the outputs. Bayonet the Wounded I worked as a financial auditor for two and a half years in my early career. During that time, as I would go to different businesses … Continue reading Financial Auditing: Quality Control for Metric Engines

In a number of my videos I’ve been on different modes of transportation, including a plane, a train, a taxi, a bus, a bike, and even an ill-fate attempt to video while walking. Today’s video is while riding a scooter. A scooter is the most nimble yet quick form of transportation out of all of them I’ve recorded on. In financial reporting, a spreadsheet is … Continue reading Excel: The Scooter of Financial Reporting