Reinventing the General Ledger

Mark Nittler and I go back a long way. And every time we meet, it seems like the conversation drifts to some version of REA (Resources, Events, Activities) Accounting. Could be because when we met I was at Price Waterhouse and we had a tool called GENEVA aimed at manipulating large events databases. Could be because he was at Walker Interactive which provided accountants a very flexible coding block to track various non-accounting perspectives of data.

Mark, now at Workday, has introduced a financial module which incorporates the contemporary concept of "tags" (See Dan Farber's perspective here, and Dennis Howlett's here.) Workday also delivers its software as a service - so in many ways, a long cry from the big mainframe, DB2 driven ledgers Walker
delivered.

The question is are conservative accountants ready for these innovations?