First, automation is a new orthogonal dimension. You can have automation with or without plain text.
Second, your emphasis on "automation" leads me to believe that perhaps you misunderstand what accounting is. Accounting is not just taking a list of transactions and recording them (database, file etc). That is called bookkeeping. Yes, accounting is also amenable to automation, but much less so than bookkeeping. Although, you could argue that when applied to the life of a normal individual, accounting and bookkeeping are almost indistinguishable. You have income, you have costs, and you have a mortgage - pretty straightforward. My point is in general you cannot entirely automate accounting. The reason for that is that accounting isn't just processing bytes, but instead requires the understanding of the underlying economics associated with the transactions. This understanding in turn isn't stored anywhere other than the accountant's mental model of the entity he's doing the accounting for.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't disagree with you that accounting could use more automation. Everything could use more automation. But for something it's more straightforward than others.
> This understanding in turn isn't stored anywhere other than the accountant's mental model of the entity he's doing the accounting for.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. It isn’t impossible (for most use cases) to embed that mental model into your automation tools.
You the correct that it means you can’t have purely general purpose automation that will do all accounting work for every entity, but you could certainly create automation rules that cover everything (or nearly everything) for some particular entity.
First, automation is a new orthogonal dimension. You can have automation with or without plain text.
Second, your emphasis on "automation" leads me to believe that perhaps you misunderstand what accounting is. Accounting is not just taking a list of transactions and recording them (database, file etc). That is called bookkeeping. Yes, accounting is also amenable to automation, but much less so than bookkeeping. Although, you could argue that when applied to the life of a normal individual, accounting and bookkeeping are almost indistinguishable. You have income, you have costs, and you have a mortgage - pretty straightforward. My point is in general you cannot entirely automate accounting. The reason for that is that accounting isn't just processing bytes, but instead requires the understanding of the underlying economics associated with the transactions. This understanding in turn isn't stored anywhere other than the accountant's mental model of the entity he's doing the accounting for.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't disagree with you that accounting could use more automation. Everything could use more automation. But for something it's more straightforward than others.