XBRL-based general purpose financial reports will undoubtedly play some role in financial reporting going forward. There are already thousands and thousands XBRL-based general purpose financial reports being created every year all around the globe.
While many of these reports do not leverage XBRL's extensibility and are basically forms and easy to work with; there are many other reports that do leverage XBRL's extensibility and are considerably harder to work with. Over time software will improve and become easier to use.
But, most professional accountants are behind the learning curve when it comes to using XBRL. Even those professional accountants involved with creating XBRL-based reports that are submitted to the SEC still have a lot to learn. Why do I say that? Easy to understand errors that you see in the XBRL-based reports submitted by public companies to the SEC.
And so, to help rectify this situation several other CPAs and I have put together two documents. The first document, Best Practices for Evaluating an XBRL-based Digital Financial Report, provides a framework, principles, philosophies, processes, and techniques for evaluating the quality of an XBRL-based general purpose financial report. The second document, XBRL-based Digital Financial Report Analysis Report (Microsoft), is an actual analysis of a report using that guidance.
While other guidance exists, that guidance tends to be too general to be useful and not comprehensive enough to yield a good result.