Digital Financial Reporting

If you have been following my blog you will recall that I did an analysis of 5525 SEC XBRL financial filings. As a result of that analysis, I recognized that a high percentage of SEC XBRL filers all have the same core financial integrity. I both predicted this because clearly US GAAP has these financial reporting semantics and was pleased to see that a high percentage of filers followed these core financial reporting rules.

I took the queries I was using and put them into an Excel spreadsheet application which I built, put in pointers to SEC XBRL financial filings, and now you can (a) look at the financial integrity of these SEC XBRL financial flings for yourself and (b) look at the code to see how this information was derived.

You can get this working prototype financial integrity analyzer tool here.

The financial integrity report looks like this:

Clearly this is only a subset of information and only for the consolidated entity.  But, if this information is not correct, what is the chance of the rest of the information which details this information is correct?  So, this core financial information provides insight as to the semantic integrity of of the overall filing.

Again, keep in mind that this is a prototype, but it does work in most cases.  This is not totally perfected and I actually left a lot of the rougher stuff out.  If you reverse engineer the code you will realize that I am not even using an XBRL processor to grab this information.  Look at the algorithm closely and you can see how it works.

Also, recognize that you can look at any of the groups of filings I have provided (the Dow, the 10-Ks, the top 100 filers, top 1000, or the complete list of 5525 filings).  You could modify the code to look at any SEC filing; past, present, or future; and this application should work for you.

Accountants and auditors will soon recognize that working at the XBRL syntax level to create or verify SEC XBRL financial filings is not the right approach, the semantics is where all the action is.  Hopefully this working prototype will help them realize this sooner.

Here is a screen shot of the form in the prototype which lets you pick the SEC XBRL filing that you want to look at: