Digital Financial Reporting

There are many different ways to view the US GAAP Taxonomy (Version 1.0).  Just looking at the set of files is not what XBRL is all about.  Rendering the information within those files is much more interesting to business users.  Eventually, these applications will get better and better. This is a summary of many of those ways (if you know of other viewers, email me and I will add them to the list):

• Official Version:  This is the official version of the UGT.  You can basically browse the file structure, grab a file.  This is not really that useful to business users, but you can use this to see what is going on behind the scenes.  Software applications will likely grab files from here, cache them on your local machine to improve performance.
• Download:  You can download a copy and use the local version here.
• Viewer Application:  Here, you can view the taxonomy within a viewer application.  Hopefully, lots and lots of these types of applications will appear with increasingly better interfaces.
• Another Viewer Application: This is another viewer application.
• Excel:  This is an Excel spreadsheet which has the CI entry point loaded in it.  You can use the features of Excel to sort, search, etc.
• The Future:  This is not the US GAAP Taxonomy, but imagine an interface which looks like this.  This is slick!  (Developers, note the source code which is provided. Come up with something interesting and email me a link and I will reference what you created).

Each of these options has its pros and cons.  What is the coolest is that there is a possibility to do this because of XBRL.  If the US GAAP Taxonomy was in the form of a piece of paper, a PDF file, or even a set of HTML pages on a web site; repurposing the taxonomy would be significantly hard or flat out impossible.

What I look forward to is being able to do the same thing with the thousands of SEC filings which will be appearing over the coming years!