Digital Financial Reporting

I ran across something which is incredibly helpful in understandings the power of patterns. Watch the video on this web page of Duarte Diagrammer.  Notice how he mentioned that after 22 years of working with diagrams they realized that diagrams generally fell into one of five different categories.

Years ago when working to build the first XBRL taxonomy, one for US GAAP created in 2000; I noticed that the information we were putting into XBRL taxonomies for US GAAP had patterns.  I jumped over to work on the IFRS taxonomy for a number of years, same deal: patterns.  Back to the US GAAP taxonomy again: tuned the patterns. You can see information about all these different iterations and a summary of this evolution here.

I realized that these patterns even had patterns and condensed/distilled the patterns down into a set of metapatterns which are found in IFRS and US GAAP financial reports.

Believe it or not, everything in the US GAAP taxonomy fits into one of these metapatterns.

Computers love patterns.  Patterns mean that software developers can hide complexity from users. Patterns are a way to hide the complexity of SEC XBRL financial filings.