Digital Financial Reporting

I am in the final stages of brainstorming and testing my next iteration tool which helps me take a look at the SEC XBRL filings.  Here is a shell of that interface with a small subset of the entire filings which I am using for some final testing which I wanted to make available to my blog readers. 

There are three "view" into the information listed below.  There are three web sites where this information comes from: the SEC, XBRL Cloud, and information I generate. All this information is pre-processed, nothing is regenerated when you visit the page.  I generated the information and interfaces using the UBmatrix XPE XBRL processing engine, the Coyote Reporting XRun application which I received as a result of working on the US GAAP Taxonomy creation project, and Microsoft Access which is my preferred programming tool.  I use these three tools to process information and then generate the XML and HTML files which contain the information. You can download all these files and use them locally by grabbing this ZIP file. (Again, this contains only a subset of 16 filings.  My analysis will be for about 400 filings.)

Here is a breakdown of the different interfaces into this information:

• By topic.  The first view is by topic. It allows you to focus on one topic.  For example, if you wanted to take a look at the calculations validation of an SEC filing, you can use line item number (6) XBRL Calculations Validation Reports on that list. That takes you to a list of all the calculation reports for each filer.
• By file.  This is item (4) on the above list, but worth pointing out. Basically this is a matrix of every filer and every file available from whatever source.  Look down the left side of the report for a filer, the columns for the report, and the intersection "cell" contains the report you might like to take a look at.
• By filer. What this does is take a bunch of the relevant files and organizes time into a tabbed interface and lets you look at all the reports for one filer in one interface.  You can basically focus on one filer here.

I am learning a lot about using XBRL from digging into these SEC filings.  Like is said, there are two ways to learn: from making your own mistakes and from the mistakes of others. Digging into these filings really helps one learn about both the right ways and wrong ways to use XBRL.  And this is not just related to creating XBRL.  There is also a lot to be learned about building a system such as what the SEC has built, what works well and what does not.  There is a lot to learn related to creating XBRL, best practices, and so forth.  There is a lot for software vendors to learn from this in terms of features they need to provide or can provide to help filers and others. There is likewise a lot there which helps accountants and auditors who have to check over these filings.

What I think I am going to do is publish a comprehensive analysis of these filings which others in the groups mentioned above can use to learn more about XBRL.