The REA Accounting Model as an Accounting and Economic Ontology
The REA Accounting Model as an Accounting and Economic Ontology
By: William E. McCarthy, Guido L. Geerts, and Graham Gal
The monograph explores the generalized accounting framework that seeks to use data collection to gather information on resources, events, and agents within a business process.
Title information
In this AAA research monograph, McCarthy, Geerts, and Gal apply ontological analysis to the field of business transaction processing, especially in light of the conceptual foundation first posed for accounting systems as the REA (resource-event-agent) model in a 1982 Accounting Review paper. Their fundamental analysis here extends REA in terms of both the granularity plane (workflows, value chains, value networks) and the temporal plane (commitments, contracts, controls), and it questions the pervasive presence of ledger account structures in enterprise business practice. The authors finish by proposing a more general view of economic exchanges in independent collaboration spaces like blockchains.