Digital Financial Reporting

OMG will hold the first meeting of the Semantic Workbook (SXLM) Working Group at their Boston meeting in June.  You can see mention of the semantic workbook in the July 2019 meeting notes of the OMG Amsterdam meeting:

(Click image to open meeting notes)

As part of the OMG Standard Business Report Model (SBRM) we discussed the idea of the "semantic spreadsheet and semantic pivot table".  See page 2, the section "Business Usability" of this two page summary of SBRM.

This is excellent news!

We discussed the idea of a semantic spreadsheet and pivot table when I worked at UBMatrix way back in 2005 or 2006 or so during the time when we were creating XBRL Dimensions.  Essentially, that is what an XBRL-based report is when the report is created using XBRL Dimensions, a semantic spreadsheet.

Here is the set of semantic spreadsheets, or fact tables, that make up the Microsoft 2017 10-K.  Here is the full report provided in the form of the XBRL Cloud Evidence Package that is used to review XBRL-based reports.

The Microsoft 2017 10-K is really 194 separate "hypercubes" of information.

I forget which meeting it was, but at one of the XBRL International meetings I bumped into someone from Microsoft who happened to be on the Excel team.  I explained why they needed to create the capabilities to edit an XBRL-based semantic spreadsheet in Excel.  The guy looked like me as if I were crazy and last I looked, Excel did not have that functionality.

Semantic spreadsheets have been a discussion topic on my blog many times: Deductive Spreadsheet, Vision of the Semantic Spreadsheet, the "cell store" and NOLAP, digital report being a cross between a spreadsheet and pivot table and BI, the need for a global standard spreadsheet alternative, death of the electronic spreadsheet, time for a new take on spreadsheets, semantic spreadsheet, XBRL ends spreadsheet hell.

Besides the term "semantic spreadsheet", I really like the term "logical spreadsheet". That is really what is going on. This presentation, this book, this article, and this really good article all discuss logical spreadsheets.

I first used a spreadsheet in 1982, VisaCalc.  I suspect that Microsoft Excel will ultimately have semantic spreadsheet capabilities.  I would imagine it being a separate type of "sheet" that you could add, the traditional presentation-based spreadsheet is still very useful and will not go away. Sort of like a Power Pivot sheet.  It would be a core part of Excel eventually.

Wouldn't that be nice!  Anyone know someone on the Microsoft Excel team?

The digital age of accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis is going to be so cool!!!