Digital Financial Reporting

A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to any other known alternatives because it produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing things.

For the past 10 years I have been diligently working to perfect XBRL-based financial reporting when XBRL’s extensibility is used such as for the US GAAP and IFRS financial reporting schemes.  The objective was to figure out what was causing quality problems and address those issues.  What I have done was to take all the best practices that produced the desired result and avoid practices that were causing problems, and to create a working proof of concept that incorporates all of those best practices.  The result is this working example XBRL taxonomy plus a repository of XBRL instances that are used to test and verify everything is working as expected.  Here is that working proof of concept: 

• Not-for-Profit XBRL Taxonomy (Working proof of concept)

That working proof of concept was not created in isolation.  This is not the only approach to creating XBRL taxonomies that have other objectives (i.e. where extensibility is not employed). This web page has the complete set of incremental XBRL taxonomies that I have created to figure out what the end result (the URL above) should look like.  This includes specific enhancements to both the US GAAP and IFRS XBRL Taxonomies that make them work exactly like the working proof of concept referenced above.  Here is that supporting information: 

• Incremental Steps

All of this information has extensive documentation so that others can understand both the big picture and the details.  Happy to answer any questions or take any feedback that would improve this working proof of concept even more.