Digital Financial Reporting

XBRL Cloud made a viewer available which allows anyone to have a look at SEC XBRL financial filings.  I spent some time experimenting with this viewer and point out 10 great features I found in the XBRL Cloud Viewer.  Experiment with these your self.  I am using the Apple 10-Q if you wanted to follow my examples below.

1. Pivot. While the SEC "interactive data" viewer is not really that interactive, the XBRL Cloud viewer is in fact interactive.  For example, go to the balance sheet (Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets).  Grab the "Legal Entity [Axis]" and drag it down where it says "Concept" on the bottom of the balance sheet.  Also, notice the picture of the wrench and screwdriver on the tool bar, when you hover over it a yellow pop up shows "Configure".  Click on that.  This works similar to how a pivot table works in Excel.
2. Jumping around in document.  I used to call this "hypercube jumping", not really sure what to call it; but try this out.  Go to the balance sheet again as above.  Find the label "Property, plant, and equipment, net" and click on it. On the right side pane which pops up, click on the button "Linkage".  Notice that you see two networks listed.  One is the balance sheet, the other is condensed financial information.  Click on the condensed financial information line. Notice on the left how the viewer takes you to the details of property, plant, and equipment.  How cool is that!
3. Search.  This is a really nice feature!  Go to the Apple filing above, find the search text box in the upper right hand side area of the screen, type "respectively" (without the quotes), press the search button, and watch what happens.  The viewer finds the word respectively in the balance sheet labels and in a number of [Text Block]s (HTML fragments).
4. Fact tables view.  Now, a lot of people probably won't get exited about this; but it is a great modeling tool.  Click on "View" from the menu ribbon and select "Fact Table".  This shows you all the characteristics of all the facts of the selected component.  This is very helpful in creating appropriate modelling.  (It would be nice to be able to copy and paste the fact table information into Excel.)
5. Relations view.  As with the fact table above, you can view the relations.  Click on "View" and then "Taxonomy" from the menu ribbon.
6. Viewing detailed property information.  In both the fact table and relations view you can either click or double click on objects and then see the detailed information for that object in the right hand pane.
7. Viewing calculations.  Go to the balance sheet again, find total assets, click on the fact for one of the two periods shown, and then click on the "Calculations" button on the right.  Calculations are shown, the fact that they are consistent is shown, and they are not laid out upside down like many other software vendors lay them out!  Nice.
8. Sorting periods.  This is a little feature, but nice none-the-less.  If you go to the menu ribbon of the XBRL Cloud viewer, select "Options" and then "Period", notice that you can sort the periods in ascending or descending order.  Now, go to the balance sheet; change that option; and watch how the current period and prior period change order. SEC filers do this inconsistently and I end up looking at the wrong period periodically.  This helps that situation.
9. Can create direct links to the viewer.  Look at the URL of the viewer.  It may look a little funky, but if you read it closely, note the two parameters "title" and "instance".  You can change those and point to any SEC XBRL financial filing!  This is similar to what you can do with CoreFiling's Yeti.  Click hereto see what I am talking about (notice that you jumped to the concept "Assets, Total" in the US GAAP Taxonomy).  Think linked data.
10. It's free!  This is a free viewer.  You cannot beat that price.

That's all for now.