Digital Financial Reporting

I would not go as far as saying that it is a RoboCop, but I do have a rudimentary accounting analysis software agent up and running against SEC XBRL financial filings.  I am not trying to fight fraud or discover accounting shenanigans; I am simply trying to help accountants understand financial reporting and digital financial reporting best practices. I am also trying to understand how to construct quality XBRL taxonomies and what business rules are necessary to make a system work effectively.

Below is a summary of my results of my first query.  The question I was trying to answer was to see how many SEC XBRL financial filings provided a future minimum lease payments under capital leases disclosure, see what balance sheet line items they provided, and see whether I could find both a text block level disclosure and a detailed disclosure.  Here is a summary of my results:

In addition to the software agent which looks through the details of the filings, I have some other software which helps me analyze the filings.  I put together this document of a summary of that analysis for this specific disclosure. I can do this sort of analysis for any financial report disclosure.

Again, while what I have created is fairly rudimentary, I think it does help people see some of the types of things one can do with a digital financial report using automated processes which could only be done manually using typical reports which are only readable by humans.