Digital Financial Reporting

I have created an updated trial balance XBRL representation, factoring in things that I have learned since this was origionally created. (Note that this is my most current master list.)

One of the most important improvements relates to getting semantics represented correctly.  In prior versions I introduced the notion of "class-subclass" relations.  I am not calling these "type-subtype" associations per recommendations from someone.

This is what I am talking about.  Here are the type-subtype relations that I have defined in the trial balance representation in human-readable form.  In the past I only provided XBRL presentation relations.  I still provide those, but I am now representing this information using XBRL definition relations and the XBRL "general-special" arcrole.

In addition, the disclosures have improved representations.  I used to define a disclosure by simply creating an XBRL taxonomy schema like this.  But nothing really specifies that what is in the taxonomy schema is a disclosure; a machine cannot really distinguish what is in that XBRL taxonomy schema from other stuff in other XBRL taxonomy schemas.  So, what I did was define XBRL definition relations specifically specifying that those are what the conceptual model knows as a disclosure.

Those disclosures are used by the disclosure mechanics rules and the disclosure rules (I used to call this the reporting checklist).

Defining specific disclosures, providing a specification for each of the disclosures, and specifying when the disclosure is required to be provided enables the creation of processes that (a) identify disclosures in reports, (b) explicitly verifying that the disclosure is represented correctly, and (c) explicitly verifying that what has been specified as being required to be in the report is actually provided in the report.

I will explain all of this in the documentation for this trial balance representation.  If you want to follow along, watch here.