TEA

Kelly Richmond Pope in ’A forensic-accounting expert on how to treat the fraud epidemic’ published in The Economist on 19 May 2023 said that the way to treat the $5 trillion fraud epidemic was to encourage more insiders to spill the beans.

The problem is indeed huge as Pope’s article makes clear: “Research by Crowe, a financial-advisory firm, and the University of Portsmouth, in England, suggests that fraud costs businesses and individuals across the world more than $5trn each year. That is nearly 60% of what the world spends annually on health care.”

Whilst whistleblowers undoubtedly have a part to play in the fight, the fact that the problem is so large indicates that they and others such as auditors and interested stakeholders need better tools.

Triple Entry Accounting (TEA) by Pacio is the answer. TEA replacing the 500 year old double entry accounting system makes it harder to commit fraud in the first place, then easier to detect if still perpetuated by inter party collusion, and finally makes it impossible for the criminals to hide the evidence, as TEA keeps an immutable third record of inter entity transactions on a scalable distributed ledger.

TEA can help to greatly (90%+) reduce the scourge of fraud, and we propose, in so doing will become the killer use case for DLT (distributed ledger technology) or blockchain technology.

Pacio sees introducing TEA as a better means of fighting fraud than encouraging more whistleblowers. With TEA, fewer whistleblowers would be needed, and where fraud does still happen and a whistleblower reveals it, the whistleblower would be able to provide clear cut, incontestable evidence in support of their exposure.

TEA is a central part of the Pacio Vision. The Pacio White Paper describes what TEA is, how it will be implemented, and how it will be scaled to become the new world standard for accounting and business management, hugely reducing fraud in the process, contributing towards $5 trillion in economic good for the world.

The Economist said on 23 March 2023 “The next big thing in business automation is Process Mining which will help automate business long before chatbots do by identifying process inefficiencies”.

Pacio with its TARI® and TEA (Triple Entry Accounting) systems will enable this prediction for businesses of all sizes, and in an even better way than The Economist envisaged. Pacio systems will not only identify process inefficiencies but also facilitate real time improvements in unit service and product outputs of up to 40% by helping businesses identify which products or services are doing the “heavy lifting” in contributing to profit, thereby boosting net profit by up to 96%, as per the work of Professor Keith Cleland and associates described in the Pacio Whitepaper.

The Economist put it as “Software-makers are now finding ways to untangle the procedural spaghetti [of business processes with inefficiencies of between 20 and 30% of revenue] with the help of ‘process mining’. Its dull name notwithstanding, it is one of the fastest-growing areas of information technology (IT). It generated around $1bn in annual sales in 2022, reckons Gartner, an IT consultancy, and could treble in size in the next few years. Celonis, a German process-miner, recently raised $1bn at a valuation of $13bn, making it Germany’s biggest startup and its hottest tech success story since SAP, a business-software giant, was founded 50 years ago.”

Apps using Pacio TARI® and TEA systems can do all that, importantly for any size of business, as they can access all the required data in real time and make use of AI systems or chatbots to suggest process improvements to drastically cut those 20 to 30% of revenue inefficiencies.

Given how TARI® has already been proven to have the potential on its own merits to provide 40% type productivity improvements, the combination with process mining to reduce process inefficiencies, has world changing implications.

Confirmation of the strategy is provided by Coupa, a business spend optimising supplier which competes with SAP. Coupa digitises the purchasing and procurement processes for businesses and makes money by analysing large quantities of corporate transactional data, looking for areas of inefficiency. It has been acquired by private equity giant Thoma Bravo in a transaction worth $US8bn.

Mark Innes, the Coupa Vice-President for Asia-Pacific and Japan, was quoted in a 6 April 2023 article in The Australian as saying “I would say the back office is where systems are often 15 or 20 years old, and there’s scrutiny and pressure now on financial performance, profitability and customer management.” He went on to say that Coupa gave organisations full visibility into where every company dollar was spent, and that many organisations didn’t have that capability today given their legacy systems were often two decades old.

Mark may be correct in that assessment, but in Pacio’s view that is only a part of what this is all about, as even businesses using the latest IT systems, still often fail to know which products or services are profitable, and what really impacts bottom-line performance of the business. TARI® provides that clarity.

The combination of Pacio’s TARI® with real time TEA providing security (fraud reduction) plus real time access, and process mining is what will be the transformative “Next Big Thing in Business Automation”.

Triple Entry Accounting Better Fighting Fraud than More Whistleblowers

The Next Big Thing in Business Automation