Digital Financial Reporting

In the past I have referred to "my method".  I have re-branded "my method" to be the Seattle Method.

The Seattle Method is inspired by and builds on the Venetian Method which is a good practices approach to double entry bookkeeping created and documented by Luca Pacioli.  The Seattle Method is:

Proven, good practices, standards-based pragmatic approach to creating provably high quality XBRL-based general purpose financial reports that builds on the Venetian Method of double entry bookkeeping and adapting it for the information age

The Venetian Method has adapted to serve society many times over its 500 year history serving commerce.  The Seattle Method supplements the Venetian Method, better tuning it to serve the need for "digital" as we transition from the industrial age to the information age.  Welcome to the Fourth Industrial Revolution!

The focus of the Seattle Method is financial reporting using financial reporting schemes such as US GAAP, IFRS, UK GAAP, and other schemes where the preparer of a financial report is permitted to modify the report model.  Because modification of the report model is allowed, those modifications must be controlled to keep the modifications within permitted boundaries.

New name, but nothing about the method has changed.  Join the increasing number of software vendors that are using the Seattle Method to create effective XBRL-based digital financial reporting.

Here are resources for helping you understand the Seattle Method: 

• Build Up of Examples
• Logical Theory Describing Financial Report (Terse)
• Examples
• Conformance Suite

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If you are interested in the history of all this, check out XBRLS from 2008, the Financial Report Semantics and Dynamics Theory, the original submission to OMG, and my blog archive. Before all that there was "the patterns document".