Triple Entry Accounting Conference 2023 highlights: Bringing a new accounting paradigm for the Information Age

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The Triple Entry Accounting (TEA) Inaugural Conference, an initiative of TEA guru Ian Grigg, took place in Malta on November 10 and 11 with the tagline “A New Accounting Paradigm for the Information Age.”

Seven academic papers were presented during the two-day event, covering everything from auditing, artificial intelligence (AI), social assistance, blockchain, Bitcoin, and Hollywood, and how each of these areas relates back to accounting.

To complement the content presented, the organizers arranged a pre-event welcome cocktail reception and dinner for all attendees, followed by breakfast, lunch, and dinner throughout the two conference days.

The quality of the presentations plus the thoughtful networking opportunities, and the lovely Malta weather made the TEA conference an exceptional experience for everyone.

Torje Sunde, CFO of UNISOT, was one of the presenters and a well-known advocate of TEA in relation to the supply chain. In the paper Sunde presented, he said one of the key objectives is to attract people from different disciplines to build TEA systems.

“We want to say that you can read a paper, it doesn’t matter which background you have, you don’t have to understand credits, you don’t have to understand advanced cryptography, but you can just read it and understand triple entry accounting, and we want to build a team that can really make this a reality because auditors all over the world need this,” he said.

Sunde pointed out another objective of the paper: to create a protocol that can make accounting verifiable with only one ledger.

“With the current double-entry accounting, people can have multiple set of books, so they can show one book to someone, and they can change the numbers and show fictitious numbers to someone else,” he explained.

“With triple entry accounting, we can define a single source of truth for that, and we can say this is the book we’re going to write, and that can be verified,” Sunde added.

Smart Blockchain Technologies’ Dr. Eva Porras, conference mentor and part of the organizing committee, found a lot of value in Sunde’s presentation and also nChain’s.

“[Sunde] was explaining how to do the triple entry accounting of his company and, by extension, partner companies. This was fantastic, and he was not alone. nChain were making a parallel presentation, so they were very complimentary, and it was very exciting to see both points of view,” she shared.

“These two were on the case of the set-up of the technology,” she said.

Porras also commented on Ted Rivera’s paper on Hollywood and the background of the movie industry.

“It was about distribution of rights, money, and how to avoid corruption in this industry,” she recounted.

“So it was a fantastic paper, fantastically well written, and he presented it in a way that made us all very engaged, and we understood the problems, as well as how the solutions came with triple entry accounting technology,” she added.

Grigg, who presented the first paper of the event and opened the second day with a summary of what had been covered so far, describes TEA as nothing short of “revolutionary.”

According to Grigg, TEA changes accounting by creating a more solid data framework.

Grigg said accounts are based on events that actually happen between companies instead of accounts being just opinions of the company. As companies create records together, they become self-proving facts of the event, and this represents a much more solid foundation for accounting.

It’s no longer possible to make up transactions.

Looking back at how the first TEA Conference went, Konstantinos Sgantzos, Head of Department at PPC S.A., event paper presenter, and renowned AI expert, complimented the event’s focus on blockchain as it is closely related to TEA.

“Triple entry accounting is the system that the blockchain was built upon, and I would like to see more and new researchers utilizing this technology to change the world,” he said.

“It is really, really remarkable technology, and it has been hidden for quite some time because we didn’t have the technology to implement it properly—until now. Let’s see if it happens!” Sgantzos proposed.

Watch: Triple Entry Accounting on blockchain