Digital Financial Reporting

The following is a list of URLs which point the the four XBRL conformance suites currently published by XBRL International.

• XBRL 2.1 Conformance Suite: http://www.xbrl.org/2008/XBRL-CONF-CR4-2008-07-02/xbrl.xml
• XBRL Dimensions 1.0 Conformance Suite: http://www.xbrl.org/2006/XDT-CONF-CR3-2006-06-06/xdt.xml
• FRTA Conformance Suite: http://www.xbrl.org/technical/guidance/FRTA-CONF-RECOMMENDATION-2005-04-25/index.xml
• FRIS Conformance Suite: http://www.xbrl.org/technical/guidance/FRIS-CONF-PWD-2004-11-14/index.xml

Here is a link to an RSS feed which can be read by a software application to grab information about these conformance suite tests: http://www.xbrlsite.com/rss-conformance.xml. 

Here is a link to a web page maintained by one software vendor, Reporting Standards, which publishes their test results against these tests:  XBRL 2.1=http://www.reportingstandard.com/conformance.xhtml; XBRL Dimensions=http://www.reportingstandard.com/xdtresults.xhtml.

Personally, I wish more vendors would publish their test results which explicitly states their compliance to, or non-compliance with the XBRL International specifications, which modules of XBRL they support with and comply with.  Seems like a reasonable, a transparent thing to do.

In addition to being essential for being sure software complies with the XBRL specification or a module or other guidance, these tests are great examples of how to use, or not use XBRL.

Business users purchasing XBRL software should ask software vendors which of these conformance tests the vendor passes.