Digital Financial Reporting

Are you building or buying the right software applications?  This presentation, Semantics Overview, helps you understand if you are.

Smart data/applications:

• Knowledge baked in
• New knowledge can be inferred/added
• Agility to adapt to ever-changing conditions
• Semi-automated data integration
• Machine intelligence

I predict that you will see digital financial reporting applications with these characteristics in 1 to 2 years. But, before software applications can work in this manner, they need the right metadata.  The metadata is key to making them work.

These applications will work better than today's legacy software applications for creating financial reports such as Microsoft Word which have no knowledge or understanding of financial reports or financial reporting.  These applications will generate perfectly modeled XBRL output without their users ever having to understand anything about the XBRL technical syntax.

Not only are these types of software applications inevitable, they are imminent.  Like I said, 1 to 2 years.  Seem hard to believe?  Well, I have mentioned these sorts of things pretty much every year for the past 14 years, for example here in 2009.  I sometimes described this sort of application as something like a "modifiable TuboTax" type application for creating financial reports, driven by metadata.

Users won't adopt digital financial reporting and these types of applications because of regulatory mandates; they will adopt digital financial reporting because it is better and easier than today's approach.  Hard to believe given today's XBRL software.  However, once you see this software you will become a believer.

This is what XBRL has always been about; semantic, model based, structured authoring.  The ability to exchange this information between software applications and analysis is a byproduct.

Check out the presentation, decide for yourself, place your bets on the table.

For more information, read the PWC paper on Disclosure Management and the Project10X executive summary.