Digital Financial Reporting

I have updated the documentation of the conceptual model of an XBRL-based digital financial report. The model itself really has not changed, the documentation has just been tuned and explained a bit better.

The tuning is the result of work that I am doing with the OMG Standard Business Report Model working group.

The objective of all this work is to enable the creation of easy to use software that can be used to create high-quality XBRL-based financial reports.  Today, most software used to create XBRL-based reports is too hard to use and does not provide for the creation of high-quality (i.e. error free) financial reports.

Proof of this claim that software is not up to the task is the fact that most XBRL-based reports are created by filing agents and the number of flaws in even the high-level financial concepts being reported per my quarterly measurements.

Further, there are no real process improvements from the approach that is currently being used.  The structured nature of XBRL is not really being leveraged to improve processes.  What is happening is that additional work is "bolted on" to existing processes to generate the required XBRL-based reports.

There is a better way.