Leslie Castle, a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and accounting firm partner, finds herself in a reflective mode, recollecting several previous conversations with several nonaccountants that had questioned some core contemporary financial reporting practices pertaining to balance sheets. In particular, she had been challenged to consider that balance sheets and their related disclosures should:
•move from acquired-only to acquired and internally created intangible assets;
•move from financial-only to financial and nonfinancial measures;
•move from many acceptable accounting method choices to fewer acceptable accounting method choices;
•move from single-measure numbers to ranges, probabilities, and sensitivity analyses; and
•move from articulated to nonarticulated balance sheets and income statements.
The case provides an opportunity for reimagining some of accounting’s traditional balance sheet conventions and related disclosures. The two questions posed in the case title undergird the case tasks for student pursuit and are in part the foundational questions posed in the general process of design thinking, an appropriate mindset for discussing this case.
