Beyond Financial Dominance: A Multi Ledger Architecture for Modern Organizational Performance

Author-written abstract

Abstract

Contemporary organizations operate in environments characterized by complexity, interdependence, and rapid information flows, yet most continue to rely on accounting architectures developed for industrial-era production systems. Traditional financial accounting was designed to satisfy external reporting requirements and gradually evolved into an internal performance regime that favors financial indicators over other forms of organizational value. Research across management accounting, organizational behavior, and financialization demonstrates that this single-ledger architecture produces systematic distortions, including the concentration of decision rights, the marginalization of cross-functional expertise, and the underinvestment in capacity, learning, and long-term organizational health. These distortions are not isolated but structural, emerging predictably from the dominance of financial metrics in internal governance systems. This white paper introduces Integrated Value Architecture (IVA), a multi-ledger accounting and performance framework that addresses these structural limitations. IVA expands the accounting architecture to include five ledgers capturing financial performance, operational quality, organizational capacity, externalities and equity, and learning and innovation. The framework integrates these ledgers into a coherent performance system supported by a governance model that distributes interpretive authority across functions. IVA contributes to ongoing debates in accounting and governance by offering a structural mechanism for reducing financial dominance, improving decision quality, and aligning performance systems with traditional organizational demands. The framework provides leaders with a more comprehensive representation of value creation and supports the development of resilient, equitable, and strategically coherent organizations.

Research contribution

The paper moves the performance question from metrics to architecture.

• Explains how external financial reporting architecture became an internal performance regime.
• Names concentration of decision rights and marginalization of cross-functional expertise as structural effects rather than isolated management failures.
• Introduces five ledgers for Financial, Operational, Capacity, Learning and Innovation, and Externalities and Equity value.
• Distributes interpretive authority across functions instead of requiring all value to pass through financial translation.
• Frames multi-ledger governance as a mechanism for decision quality, resilience, equity, and long-term organizational coherence.

Research lineage

The working paper established the problem; the public Standard formalized the architecture.

The January 2026 paper introduced IVA as a multi-ledger accounting and performance framework. IVA Governance Architecture Standard v1.1 now supplies the public doctrine for domain independence, non-consolidation, structural recognition, Structural Value Units, ledger registers, reporting cadence, and conformance boundaries.

Persistent record

DOI, SSRN, and author identifier.

Suggested citation

Cite the working paper, not this summary page, for the paper's claims.

Foster, E. M. (2026). Beyond Financial Dominance: A Multi Ledger Architecture for Modern Organizational Performance. IVA Working Paper No. 001. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6050034