Digital Financial Reporting

28msec has said that it is OK to make people aware of SECXBRL.info (BETA), a repository of US public company financial information, which is a working prototype that they have created.

Be sure that you understand what you see.  There are three important pieces:

1. SECXBRL.info is both a graphical user interface (GUI) and application programming interface (API) what allows you to make use of public company financial information.  The information comes from SEC XBRL financial filings but the information is not stored as XBRL.  The repository stores the information in a form which is more representitive of the information. That makes the information easier to query.
2. SECXBRL.info is an instance of 28.io which is optimized for XBRL and customized for public company financial filings.  Want to implement XBRL?  You can do that same thing for any XBRL-based system.  You start with a base which is common to every XBRL implementation and add what is custom to your implementation.  Basically, SECXBRL.info was created in order to figure out the best approach to implementing XBRL more generally and test the implementation to be sure it is working correctly. This is one of the most functional working prototypes that I have ever seen!
3. If you want more control over your system, use 28.io and implement any architecture you might like or take some existing application profile and tweak it to your needs.  Or, don't want to bother with that? Just use some other application profile as-is, no IT skills needed.  As I understand it you can have a repository up and running in an afternoon and they are working toward a 100% self-service.

Here is some specific information to help you check out what SECXBRL.info can do.  First, this PDF walks you through a bunch of basic query examples. This ZIP file contains an Excel spreadsheetwhich has VBA code which walks you how to use the API in Excel.

Next, here are a handful of things which I find the most interesting and useful about SECXBRL.info.  Many of these are things which I created functionally for which I convinced 28msec to provide.

• Report components: This is a list of the components within a filing submitted by Microsoft. Notice all of the metadata about each of the components.
• Model structure of balance sheet: This is a list of all the report elements which make up the balance sheet of the report filed by Microsoft.
• Query across filings:  This query across filings lists the component(s) of the report which contain a specific concept. That query does what I showed in this video which was explained in this blog post.  (Note that it took my query a minute to execute, this query is substantially faster.)
• Fundamental accounting concepts comparison:  This query grabs my fundamental accounting concepts for each of the DOW 30 entities.
• Query for specific disclosure:  This query allows you to find the balance sheet for the entities specified. You may want to ask yourself how the balance sheet is being identified.
• Query across dimensions: This query of the concept assets across the geographic areas dimension.

That is good for now.  I will make more advanced query examples available later.  If there is anything specific that you might want send me an email.