More Financial Report Related Metadata
Tuesday, October 30, 2012 at 09:28AM
Charlie in Demonstrations of Using XBRL

In a previous post I mention how metadata will reduce costs.  Metadata also increases functionality.

I put together a prototype system which provides information about SEC financial filings filed with the SEC. The prototype uses a set of 291 public company 10-K filings which I was analyzing (i.e. it does NOT contain all of the approximately 8,000 public companies which report to the SEC, only 291).  The system uses:

The prototype information system is basically a Microsoft SQL Server database. MS SQL has an XML data type. There is ZERO XBRL being used by this system.  All the information was grabbed from the SEC XBRL financial filings, processed into easier to use infosets, the infosets are organized and stored in the MS SQL database (rather than the XBRL).

In my view, this is how people will work with financial information reported using XBRL.  Imagine how long it would take for something like the following query to execute:

"Go to each SEC XBRL filing (in the set of 291 filings), get Assets, liabilities and equity, equity, net income (loss), net cash flow, revenues, income (loss) from continuing operations, income tax expense (benefit), current assets, and current liabilities for each of those filings."

Downloading the 291 files in order to read the information with even good bandwidth would take quite some time.  But, click on this link and you can see how long it takes the database to return that information.  (From my computer it takes about 5 seconds)

You can fiddle around with all the XML (machine readable, try using Excel) and HTML (human readable) pages I made available.  But let me walk you through a few things so that you can see the power of metadata.

There is a lot more that you can fiddle around with. Notice all the places where metadata is used to help you filter, find, organize, slice, dice, or otherwise work with this test set of 291 SEC XBRL financial filings.  It is even more useful when working with the complete set of SEC filings.

Article originally appeared on XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting (http://xbrl.squarespace.com/).
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