Common standards are all very well, but unfortunately accountancy takes place within Corporate silo's, and standards all too often get perverted to suit the proprietary systems and software foisted by corporate service providers on their unenthusiastic "partners" (aka clients).

Todd Boyle's  Ledgerism is light years ahead of most other things I have read in terms of accounting in the age of the Internet.

He came from the ground up to the idea of a Shared Transaction Repository whereas I was coming at it from a high level Market 3.0 perspective.

Unfortunately, we both couch our work in language largely inaccessible even to each other (we met in San Francisco a few years ago, and are meeting again in Seattle next month, I hope...), so what chance anyone else has, I don't know!

In plain English what we are both saying is that in a Peer to Peer world, Double Entry book-keeping is both unnecessary

Abolish Double Entry

and a cosmic waste of resources: Todd identified a $150 Billion Waste arising from fragmented and disconnected accounting silo's.

I see it from the point of view of an "Open Corporate" partnership as an optimal enterprise model - since within a partnership there is no "Profit" and no "Loss".

So a partnership's internal accounts could be looked upon as a "shared transaction repository", and I advocate simply extending the partnership/ "Open Corporate" to incorporate other stakeholders, such as suppliers, staff, and customers.

Interesting consequences if you do that: for instance VAT goes out of the window, and in fact the only remaining tax that still applies would be a "Value Transfer Tax".

I know Todd did some web accounting work in Norway during the DotCom boom, but that went "pear-shaped" and he has long since given up trying to convince people, gave up his accountancy and is now a community activist.

IMHO your mate might do well to check out Todd's work.