Digital Financial Reporting

The OMG's forthcoming Standard Business Report Model (SBRM) is a logical conceptualization of a business report. XBRL International's Extensible Business Report Language (XBRL) is one technical syntax that can be used to represent a business report in machine-readable form.  There are other machine-readable formats.

My "Proof" test case or business use case exercises 100% of what you would ever find in an XBRL-based digital financial report.  Believe it or not, it is true.  The Proof representation was specifically designed for that purpose; to exercise SBRM in order to make sure it met the needs of financial reporting.  I have many other test cases/use cases.

I have now been able to represent 100% of the financial report logic found in the Proof representation using six different technical syntax (seven if you view raw XBRL and Inline XBRL as different technical syntax).  You can download each one and have a look at it from here:

• XBRL: This representation includes raw XBRL and Inline XBRL.  Other functionality can be performed such as validation and rendering using standard off-the-shelf software that supports the global standard XBRL.  To understand all that, see this web page.
• Microsoft Access (i.e. SQL): The XBRL, Excel, and CSV representations all came from this Microsoft Access database application.  You can download the version with the code that outputs XBRL here.
• Excel: This Excel version is simply an Excel spreadsheet for each database table.
• CSV:   This CSV version is simply the Excel spreadsheet saved as CSV from Excel.
• RDF/OWL/SHACL: (Work in progress) This is being created by the team creating SBRM; the Proof version has not yet been created, this is a representation of the Accounting Equation that is partially complete for the time being.
• PROLOG: (Work in progress) This is being created by a PROLOG expert and will be completed over the next several months.  Currently, a PROLOG version is provided for the SFAC 6 example which does not include a couple of mathematical relations that the Proof representation includes, but it will give you a very good idea that the Proof example can be represented using PROLOG.

What does this mean?  First, no matter what technical syntax is used; 100% of the business logic of the use case must be able to be represented vial that technical syntax.  This pretty much proves that any of the syntax alternatives above could be used to represent a business report in machine-readable form.  You can choose which technical syntax you prefer to work with; but you cannot simply leave information out.  Second, if you can get information into any one of these technical syntax you can convert the logical representation into any other technical syntax.

Which technical syntax is best?  Well, that is up to you.  Pick whatever technical syntax you like from above.  Create another technical syntax. Each alternative has a specific set of pros and cons.