DEVELOPING CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL f STATEMENTS USING A PROTOTYPE t EXPERT SYSTEM

In the development ofaccounting fmancial statements for external pur­ poses, ftrms face the problem of consolidating fmancial statement data across two dimensions: companies (or e.g., proftt centers) and accounts. This paper presents a prototype expert system developed using Prolog, FINSTA, designed to aggregate accounts across the second dimension in order to develop fmancial statements. The system uses natural lan­ guage account titles and account dollar amounts as inputs and prepares aggregated ftnancial statements as outputs. In order to accomplish this task, FINST A fIrst processes symbolic information (e.g., account titles) and then uses that and other information from that process in the con­ text ofan analytic model that it also solves in order to develop the fman­ cial statements. Thus, FINST A uses multiple types of knowledge and processes that knowledge in a number of different ways.