Digital Financial Reporting

Quality of public company XBRL-based financial filings to the SEC continued to improve as measured against a set of 21 fundamental accounting concept relations.  In May, the first generator reached 80% consistency for all their filings.  In June, three generators reached the 80% mark.  In July, 5 generators reached 80%.

In August, four very noteworthy things happened:

• The first generator reached the 90% quality level as measured by these fundamental accounting concept relations.  Congradulation DataTracks!
• There are now 7 generators that have exceeded the 80% quality level (that means that 80% of all the public company filings created using that generator pass every one of the 21 consistency checks)
• Merrill moved from 12th place in terms of quality by this measure into 2nd place.  Merrill's quality level went from 73% to 88%.
• The percentage of XBRL-based public company financial filings which were consistent with all of the fundamental accounting concept relations rose to 75.5%.

Here are the details:

This graphic below (click for a larger, readable image) shows a comparison for June, July, and August 2015 and shows Merrill's big jump: 

(Click image for larger view)

This graphic shows a comparison of prior measurements.  The blue bar is the number of XBRL-based public company financial filings measured and the red line shows the number that are consistent with all of the fundamental accounting concept relations:

Thank you to all the software vendors and filing agents who feel they have an obligation to act and are taking the quality of XBRL-based public company financial reports seriously.  I would point out that these progressive software vendors and generators who are pushing their quality higher are doing so without much direct pressure from the SEC or other authorities.  They are doing so because it is the right thing to do.