Skip to content

From a source to an accounting obligation

A published rule does not say whether a particular business must file tomorrow. Accounting Office must connect the rule's effective date to the entity's registrations, the transaction, the reporting period, and evidence that the required act was completed. This study follows that connection from research through professional review to a scheduled obligation.

This public study proposes additions for a possible successor revision of accounting.office, dated 2026-09-19. It does not publish an accepted successor contract, retire revision 1, or accept the Composition into the Portfolio. The existing candidate remains the revision 1 reference. Material additions below require explicit revision acceptance under Workflow; they are not new Core records, registered Patterns, or executable country support.

One question, bounded evidence

A question case begins with one decision: classify an advance, determine a filing obligation, recognize an asset, or resolve a discrepancy with a professional. It pins the entity-profile revision, event and period, source documents, known and missing facts, decision deadline, and permitted downstream use.

Research should remove questions that public evidence already answers. It cannot discover a private contract, choose commercial rights for an owner, or infer a registration from a country name. An unresolved question is routed to the person who holds the missing fact or authority. The proposed dispositions are researched, awaiting facts, awaiting decision, awaiting professional review, accepted for a specified scope, disputed, and superseded. None means executed.

An answer retains its facts, applicable rule revisions and pinpoint sources, alternatives, calculation trace, exceptions, and proposed next step. A professional review binds the exact answer and inputs, reviewer capacity, date, scope and conditions. Silence is not acceptance; agreement on one case does not validate every future transaction or a whole jurisdiction pack. The reference-book comparison preserves disagreements.

Sources and effective rules

Source custody and rule admission are separate. A snapshot records issuer, canonical URL, publication reference, captured bytes and digest, capture time, document date, language, pinpoint passages and coverage failures. A successful HTTP response may still be a challenge page. A hash establishes byte identity, not legal authority, currency or applicability.

A proposed rule revision adds effective intervals, transition provisions, required facts, exceptions, deadline and calculation logic, applicable form/schema versions, reviewer admission and fixtures. The time a rule was learned is distinct from the time it governs. A newly published rule may be future-effective; an old official guide may omit a later amendment.

When an authority publishes a change, identify affected open cases and propose re-evaluation. Do not silently rewrite closed books or previously filed returns. A provider notification or website change is a research trigger, not an admitted rule update. Where no authoritative feed exists, a bounded periodic source check may propose a diff; it must report missing coverage.

Definitions and actual obligations

An obligation definition specifies applicability, event or recurring trigger, deadline algorithm, calendar and time zone, evidence needed, exact recipient/form family, preparer and signatory roles, and completion criteria. An entity-specific instance pins those revisions and the facts that activated it. False applicability and unknown applicability must remain different states.

Each instance keeps the statutory deadline separate from an earlier internal preparation target. It names the actual accountable owner and delegate, records status as of a known time, and keeps any payment deadline, next review and escalation time explicit. Rejected, missed and reopened instances retain their history and require a documented next action. It also keeps prepared, reviewed, authorized, submitted, accepted, paid and reconciled outcomes separate where relevant. A tax return, its payment and a regulator's receipt are related records, not interchangeable evidence. A postponed meeting cannot postpone a statutory deadline.

Schedules use Workflow's occurrence law. Repeated observations of the same event must not create duplicate obligations. A timeout after submission remains indeterminate until reconciled against the original external identity. Professional acceptance of the tax treatment does not authorize a payment or filing.

Public knowledge and private operation

The public contract owns reusable record shapes, transitions and wholly synthetic fixtures. Jurisdiction packs own effective rules and applicability tests. A private entity profile selects those rules using actual registrations and circumstances; private evidence, books, correspondence, account references and grants remain entity-scoped outside the public repository.

This is more than replacing names in configuration. Retention, authority, source coverage, professional judgments and publication rights are part of the boundary. Reusing a supplier's invoice does not grant access to its books. Reusing an accountant's answer must respect its agreed scope and permitted use. A public example must not reconstruct a private transaction pattern.

For a bounded agent, route: entity and period → event → required facts → effective sources → deterministic calculation → answer candidate → applicable review → separately authorized effect. An index chooses the next owner; it neither assembles unlimited context nor upgrades research into law. The existing privacy and entity boundaries continue to apply.

Cases that must defeat an incorrect design

  • A future amendment is mistakenly applied to an earlier transaction: reject the rule selection.
  • A registration date is absent: preserve unknown applicability rather than generating a zero return.
  • A source fetch returns a challenge page: retain the failure, never mark the rule current.
  • A deadline crosses a holiday or jurisdiction boundary: use the pinned calendar and explain the result.
  • A form exists for the previous year only: refuse to label it as the new year's accepted payload.
  • An accountant corrects an answer: retain both versions and identify affected proposals.
  • A second entity uses another jurisdiction: require its own facts and rules, never inherit a convenient default.
  • A filing times out: observe the original attempt before retrying; do not manufacture acceptance.

Acceptance requires synthetic fixtures for these cases, reproducible calculations and source lineage, and an explicitly scoped comparison against reference professional outputs. The State of Work remains the delivery owner. This study creates neither a tax filing engine nor a professional certification.