Digital Financial Reporting

One of the significant issues with XBRL-based public company financial reports to the SEC is that there is no one set of consistency checks that everyone uses to check their digital financial reports.  The SEC has its Edgar Filer Manual (EFM) tests (interactive data public test suite), XBRL-US has their consistency suite, XBRL Cloud has their tests, I have my fundamental accounting concepts and minimum criteria tests, and I suppose that each software vendor has proprietary tests and checks that they do.

What there really needs to be is ONE set of consistency checks that is used by everyone, not different versions of tests and checks which cause different versions of consistent and inconsistent.

I have made available all of my fundamental accounting concepts work free of any restrictions at all to XBRL US or anyone else for that matter.  I really hope they take advantage of that work.  I would encourage everyone to encourage the XBRL-US Data Quality Committee to consider leveraging this work.

All of this can be downloaded here.  Perhaps what I am doing is more sophisticated that what XBRL-US is doing right now or willing to take on.  However, the fundamental accounting concepts offers important information about how to best create the US GAAP XBRL Taxonomy and tests which will be important down the road.

I don't know if people remember my state-of-the art example of using XBRL definition relations.  These are more along the lines of what is really needed to get XBRL-based digital financial reports dialed in correctly. Those consistency checks will make more sense when software starts guiding professional accontants in the creation of financial reports (i.e. expert systems).

People will eventually figure this out. What about you?  Are you going to be proactive and therefore ahead of the curve or are you going to be reactive and therefore behind the curve playing catchup?

Each strategy has it pros and cons.  But either way: things are about to change big time.