Digital Financial Reporting

I have updated and improved what I am calling my PROOF BASELINE.  Sometimes people think fast and shallow.  Other times people thing slow and deep.  For the past 15 or so years I have been thinking slowly and deeply about XBRL-based financial reporting.  I have taken all the information I have accumulated, synthesized that information into this PROOF BASELINE and using a theory, framework, and method based on proven best practices and global standard XBRL figured out one way to make XBRL-based digital financial reporting work. (Click image for larger view)

The updates and improvements include: 

• Synchronizing the representation of the financial reporting scheme knowledge graph, financial report model, and toolkit for scrutinizing reports to be sure they are properly functioning.
• Settled on terminology that will be used.
• Incorporated the ideas of the OMG Standard Business Report Model.
• Created a more complete set of examples that exercises and proves the theory, framework, and method.

I am not holding out this approach to be the only approach or even the absolutely best approach.  This is more of a starting point than the end game.  I have shown that XBRL-based digital financial reporting can work and I have not seen anything that works better to meet the use case of US GAAP or IFRS based financial reporting where report models can be changed and therefore must be controlled to maintain high quality.

Believe it or not, the PROOF BASELINE not only incorporates all complexity that you would find in any US GAAP or IFRS financial report; it is also reconciled to US GAAP, IFRS, UK GAAP, and Australian IFRS.  All of this is rigorously and thoroughly tested using four different software applications including: 

• Pacioli
• XBRL Cloud
• Pesseract
• XBRLQuery

Finally, using this theory, framework, and method significanlty reduces software development time at the same time information quality is enhanced.

Stay tuned for more information.