Modeling Accounting Systems to Support
Multiple Tasks: A Progress Report

Walter Hamscher 
Price Waterhouse Technology Centre,
68 Willow Road,
Menlo Park, CA 94025

An interface protocol for reasoning about economic entities already
exists and has been in use for many years.  In the USA, this interface
is called GAAP: Generally Accepted Accounting Practices.  Financial
reporting conventions - the content, form and meaning of balance
sheets, income statements, cash flow statements, of ledgers, journals,
credits and debits - serve the purpose of allowing outside entities to
examine and understand business enterprises and their performance.
The common underlying terminology of exchanges, payments, loans,
invoices, and so forth is a lingua franca of all business enterprises.
Historical monetary cost is a tried-and-true abstraction for
representing the ``value'' of all sorts of physical assets,
liabilities and so forth. This paper briefly summarizes some
observations on modeling enterprises {from} an accounting perspective,
acquired in a model-based reasoning project undertaken at the Price
Waterhouse Technology Centre: SAVILE.