Accounting practices were established in the 15th century, not to solve information problems, but to compensate for the inherent limitations of pencil and paper technology. 

Using computers to emulate pencil and paper practices is like replacing a horse with a car and then hitching the car to a covered wagon; we gain efficiency but are still stuck in the same old, ‘covered-wagon’ functionality.  Both information and technology
are badly underutilized.

This is not to say we don’t need accounting results.  We do.  But just emulating pencil and paper practices to get them limits, diminishes, and destroys information. 

Accounting deals almost exclusively in informational consequences, not causes ... in shadow, not substance. The emphasis is how to provide a prescribed set of financial results (secondary information ... shadow) for every business without having to fully develop the informational details (primary information ... substance) for any business.  Journal entries are used to get an answer right without having to capture or sometimes even know the information that made the answer change.

Despite fifty or so years of commercial computing, most information perspectives are still based on and assume pencil and paper limitations.  Pencil and paper tradition essentially demands that primary information be poorly developed.  Accounting practices are designed to compensate for the virtual impossibility of managing fully realized primary information with pencil and paper; a difficulty that need not afflict computerized systems but always has because we automate pencil and paper, not information.