Another Look at the Digital Financial Reporting Principles

Monday, January 5, 2015 at 04:59PM
Charlie

Digital Financial Reporting Principles provides additional details, building on and using the Financial Report Semantics and Dynamics Theory.

There are two primary uses for the Digital Financial Report Principles document:

1. Helpful information for accounting professionals creating XBRL-based digital financial reports such as public company financial filings submitted to the SEC.
2. Helpful information for software vendors creating software used by accounting professionals for creating XBRL-based digital financial reports.

As Henry Ford said:

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

Digital financial reporting is not only inevitable, it is imminent.  If implemented correctly, digital financial reporting is useful whether required by some regulatory mandate or not.  Most people look at digital financial reporting through the rear view mirror of the last 100 or so years of paper-based financial reporting.  Fifteen years ago when XBRL-based financial reporting began it took a pretty high-powered telescope to see the vision for what digital financial reporting could be.  Today, it only takes a good set of binoculars.

However, for the market for digital financial reporting to move from the 8,000 mandated public companies to the 28 million private companies, it has to (a) work and (b) provide significant value over the current status quo.

Digital Financial Reporting Principles provides many, many clues for those who understand how to use the resource correctly.

Article originally appeared on XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting (http://xbrl.squarespace.com/).