Digital Financial Reporting

Rene van Egmond and I have updated our General Business Reporting XBRL Application Profile to include ideas from the ESEF ESMA Reporting Manual.

This document is a side-by-side comparison of four financial reporting related XBRL-based architectures (US GAAP reporting by public companies to the SEC, UK GAAP reporting by companies to HRMC, IFRS reporting by listed companies to the ESMA, IFRS AU reporting to ASIC) to what I call the "general profile".

There are two uses for the general profile:

1. First, it documents somewhat of a "de facto standard" XBRL application profile for financial reporting.
2. Second, it documents an XBRL application profile that can be used for pretty much any sort of reportng scheme.  Rather than inexperienced people trying to figure out XBRL and repeating the mistakes of others; one can pick up this profile and use it as is or modify/tweak the profile to fit their needs.

To test this application profile, I created my own reporting scheme.

There are two software applications that specifically support this "general profile".  However, there are probably about 60 software applications that are very, very close to supporting the profile and they probably don't realize it.

Any software vendor that supports XBRL-based financial reporting to the SEC (about 6,000 public companies), XBRL-based financial reporting to the HRMC (about 1,200,000 companies), or will support XBRL-based financial reporting to the ESMA (will probably be about 10,000 listed companies) essentially report this "general profile".

The beginning of the "digital switch-over" for financial reporting is here.  There is a lot that general business reporting using XBRL can learn from XBRL-based financial reporting.