Digital Financial Reporting

XBRL-based structured digital financial reporting

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Digital Financial Reporting Using XBRL

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This web site provides information on how to use XBRL to help business professionals exchange business information. Business information incluldes both financial and nonfinancial information. Everything on this site made available to all under a Creative Commons License, Public Domain Dedication. Everything may be reused however one sees fit without attribution. We do ask that you give credit where credit is due. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, ideas or other feedback, please contact charles.hoffman@me.com.

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BLOG: Digital Financial Reporting

This is a blog for information relating to digital financial reporting. This blog is basically my "lab notebook" for experimenting and learning about XBRL-based digital financial reporting. This is my brain storming platform. This is where I think out loud (i.e. publicly) about digital financial reporting. This information is for innovators and early adopters who are ushering in a new era of accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis in a digital environment.

Much of the information contained in this blog is synthasized, summarized, condensed, better organized and articulated in my book XBRL for Dummies and in the chapters of Intelligent XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

Entries in IFRS (12)

IFRS Modules Manager provides good insights to business users

The IFRS Taxonomy Modules Manager (ITMM) which is available here. I would encourage business users to take a look at this as it provides some insights for business users.

What the ITMM is trying to do is pull the pieces of a taxonomy together which a preparer would use to construct a business report, likely a financial statement. The user makes use of the application to select the pieces and then the application builds the underlying XBRL "stuff" (it is called a discoverable taxonomy set or DTS, but business users should not have to understand this level of terminology) which will be used to create an XBRL instance document (an XBRL based business report).

What is good about this is that it shows something very important to realize, particularly if you are a business user. This important point is that software can be built to do things like this. All a software application has to do is spit out the required XBRL. How it gets there is up to the software application. Don't like how the software application works in terms of features? Just give the feedback to the software developers, they can make it better.

Some features I would like to see related to this are:

Business users don't need stand alone systems like this, they need this functionallity within the tool being used to create the XBRL based business report.
Smart wizards which know what sorts of things might go together, nor never go together, would certainly help the user out. For example, the user is generally going to want ONE cash flow statement, not even be able to select both for one report.
Generate "templates" of the common stuff which is used, but the business user can then "turn on" or "turn off" pieces of the taxonomy, rather than have to wade through the entire taxonomy.

These are just a few obvious features. This list is not knocking what the folks at the IASCF are doing, but rather trying to help business users understand the types of things they could, and should, be asking for from software.

Posted on Tuesday, August 12, 2008 at 06:46AM by