XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting - Blog: Digital Financial Reporting (using XBRL)

I cherry picked from a set of 7,199 SEC XBRL financial filings, all of which are 10-Ks filed for fiscal years ended in 2012 (approximately). You can get to this data set here in HTML, or you can download the data in Excel here.

My data set includes 2,213 filings, about 31% of the total. The criteria which I set for picking the filings were as follows: (these criteria were arbitrarily set my me to improve the chance of all the numeric relations both working and PROVING to myself that they work using automated processes)

The filer had to have core financial integrity correct meaning that I had to be able to find assets, liabilities and equity, equity, net income, and net cash flows in their filing.
The filer is a commercial and industrial company, meaning that they report current assets and current liabilities.
The filer reported total liabilities.
The filer reported cash flows from operations, investing, and financing activities.
The balance sheet balances.
On the balance sheet, liabilities + commitments and contingencies + temporary equity + equity = assets.
On the cash flow statement, operating cash flows + investing cash flows + financing cash flows + cash flows from discontinued operations + exchange gains/losses = net cash flow.
On the income statement, income from continuing operations before taxes - income taxes + income/loss from discontinued operations + extraordinary items = net income.

The 2,213 filings that you see on the HTML page and in the Excel spreadsheet made that cut. There are links to both the SEC filing and to the XBRL Cloud Free Viewer so you can go look at the financial statements if you want.

What does this mean? Well, I am simply experimenting so I don't know that there are any definitive conclusions; but I think that the fact that I can pull all this information from those filings is a positive thing.

Granted, I cherry picked the SEC filers. This is the "happy path" through the data. I am avoiding filings which have errors or which have odd reporting situations. I am sure I can get more filings which pass all the rules, for example if I look at filers who report but don't use a classified balance sheet, I speculate I would get a longer list. (Well, in fact, just to check I ran this query and I got 3,272 filers which do not have classified balance sheets but to pass all the other rules; that is 46% of all filers.)

One area where I am not able to effectively pull information from is the income statement above the line "income from continuing operations before taxes". I will look into that next perhaps. If I can do that I will be able to get high level financial information from the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. Again, I am not using an XBRL processor. My tool is simply a Microsoft Access database.

Play with the data. If you find anything interesting let me know. If you have any ideas for experiments to run, let me know that also.