Using Business Use Cases to Understand XBRL

Wednesday, May 25, 2016 at 01:59PM
Charlie in Becoming an XBRL Master Craftsman

This blog post walks you through using the business use cases by providing a walk through of one of the business use cases.

First, an overview of the business use cases. The business use cases is a set of 33 examples of business information represented using XBRL.  Here is a summary of the helpful view of this information:

• Basic list of use cases
• Another basic list in a little different format
• Visual summary of use cases
• Machine-readable list of business use cases (good for running tests)

For EACH business use case you can get the following: (I am using the last business use case, nonfinancial information, as an example)

• Index page for the business use case
• XBRL instance (Human readable)
• XBRL taxonomy used by the XBRL instance (Human readable)
• XBRL Formulas (Human readable)
• XML Infoset for Model Structure (Human readable)
• XML Infoset for Fact Table (Human readable)
• Human readable information for business use case
• ZIP file you can use to DOWNLOAD all the information above

To understand the model of the information (the fact tables), read this blog post. (multidimensional model)

If you want a more comprehensive example, use this reference implementation.

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