Compensating for US GAAP and IFRS XBRL Taxonomy Design Choices
Wednesday, March 11, 2020 at 11:26AM
Charlie in Digital Financial Reporting

The video Distinguishing Between Properly Functioning and Improperly Functioning Logical Systems points out what can go wrong within a financial report logical system.  When an XBRL taxonomy is created, one needs to mitigate the possibility that those things go wrong.  When an XBRL taxonomy is created that does not mitigate those possibilities, others will have to do so in order to make use of the XBRL taxonomy effectively. That is the only way to put together a reliable, repeatable process.

Both the US GAAP and IFRS XBRL Taxonomies leave critical pieces out.  These missing pieces are problematic for those that want to create reports using the taxonomy correctly, want to consume information from such reports, and even those simply trying to understand the taxonomies.

The video, Compensating for US GAAP and IFRS XBRL Taxonomy Design Choices, lays out exactly how I compensated for these missing pieces in order to create quality financial reports and to extract information from such reports.

Here is an example of the way I compensated for these issues using the small SFAC 6 Elements of Financial Statements XBRL representation where possible and other examples shown in the video: 

A by product of using these rules is that software applications can not only verify that reports are created correctly using a relable process, but they are very helpful in constructing software interfaces that business professionals use to create and financial reports.

 

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