Digital Financial Reporting

A greatly updated/enhanced US GAAP Taxonomy Exemplar/Component viewer is available to dink around with. There are lots of things to check out including:

• View the US GAAP taxonomy components by accounting standards codification.
• A sample/prototype applicationfor showing you how to grab pieces of the US GAAP taxonomy within a software application. (NOTE: This is an Excel spreadsheet which contains macros.)
• Remember the Four Areas of Confusion I pointed out.  Here are exemplars which show you options for modeling those pieces of an SEC XBRL filing.
• Connected the XBRL Techniques and Trends Prototypes to this prototype so they are easier to find.
• Broke the larger pieces of the US GAAP Taxonomy into physically smaller pieces to make focusing on a piece easier.
• Renamed the RDF files to be consistent with the terminology used elsewhere.
• Other enhancements.

It is helpful to read this blog post to understand the components I see and to better understand my prototype.

So what is the point of all this?  Well, there are four primary points:

1. Possibilities. This is what using the US GAAP Taxonomy COULD be like. I admit I am not a very good programmer, but I think I am showing some things which could be quite useful to business users.
2. An approach. You cannot easily automatically reorganize the US GAAP Taxonomy as it stands today like I can construct reorganizations.  The reason is that I put in a lot of manual effort to put the consistency into my reorganized version of the US GAAP taxonomy which I needed in order to provide these reorganizations.  If you find these types of organizations useful and feel constrained by the current US GAAP Taxonomy organization, point this out to the FASB.  Ask them to be more explicitly and more consistent.
3. Meta data.  I have added only some meta data to the taxonomy using RDF.  Eventually others will realize the possibilities here.  What can be added is endless really. This meta data will make things even easier.
4. Maintenance.  I contend that maintenance required of software vendors, and the FASB for that matter, when it comes to periodic updates of the US GAAP Taxonomy is made easier by more consistency and explicitness in the taxonomy.

Keep in mind that these ideas are not limited to the US GAAP Taxonomy but are rather practices which will serve any taxonomy one might desire to create.