Digital Financial Reporting

I added a number of prototypes to the Learning About XBRL page.  This is what was added:

Prototypes

Here are a number of prototypes which can help you understand XBRL, understand how XBRL is going to change how financial reports are created in the future, and otherwise wrap your head around XBRL and digital financial reporting:

• XBRL Techniques and Trends: This prototype is explained on this blog post and this blog post. Basically, imagine the AICPA's Accounting Trends and Techniques not for 600 companies, rather for ever SEC filer, querying how things are reported by industry, by type of entity, etc.
• Exemplars: Exemplars are specific examples. Click on the "Show Exemplars" link in the left side pane of this prototype to go see a number of exemplars. Exemplars are explained in this blog post.
• SEC Financial Filing Recap/Examination Utility: This working prototype helps you see the types of validation or verification reports one might use to help ensure their SEC XBRL financial filings where created correctly. This blog post talks about the characteristics of a quality filing. These reports are intended to help you meet those characteristics.
• Web Service of US GAAP Taxonomy Information: It is hard to demonstrate a web serivce which is intended for one computer application to communicate with another, but this prototype tries to show that. You can get HTML renderings and XML information from this sample web service. Click on the XML link and then "view source" of the web page returned. What you will see is an easy to read (both humans and computers) of information from the US GAAP Taxonomy. Here are a few more ways to get to this information.

More enhancements to my working protype tool for checking SEC XBRL Financial filings.

• This report element summary is looking nice.
• So I organized the extension concepts added by the filer in the same way.
• Can get to the detailed information for a report element most places now including the fact table, the rendering, and the relations summary.

I have made some enhancements to my little SEC XBRL Filing Recap/Examination Utility. A reminder that this utility application is intended to help evaluate the qualityof an SEC XBRL financial filing.

The output that you see is for the reference/model implementation of an SEC XBRL financial filing which I have run through my utility tool.

Granted, this is just a working prototype and granted there are a lot of improvements which could be made such as formatting things better; but hopefully you can see through my lack of programming skills and see the true possibilities here.

Click around on the tool.  Note that the many reports are organized both "vertically" (meaning that you can get lists of things) or "horizontally" (meaning that you can get everything which relates to one specific [Table]).

One thing I think this shows is how you can "break the elephant into bite size chunks", turning on big task into lots of little tasks. Each [Table] is a separate task.  Get each [Table] correct.  Then, make sure that the relations BETWEEN the [Table]s is correct.

This Flex pivot table control demo gives you an idea what XBRL software will be like to use, eventually. Although, an XBRL pivot table or interactive data table would support XBRL (of course), would support text in addition to numbers, would not force you to use OLAP, and would be interoperable between different software applications.

The interoperability piece you can see today.  You can view the same SEC XBRL filing using the SEC interactive data viewer, the Firefox XBRL Viewer add on, the Edger Online I-Metrix application, the XBRL Cloud Viewer, and a bunch of other XBRL viewer applications.

Of particular interest in the Flex pivot table control, click on the "Open", and then "Report URL" tool bar button.  It brings up a dialog with this URL:

http://www.flexmonster.com/flash/demo2011/reports/config-product-charts.xml

If you go look at that URL, it is a configuration file.  It has configuration settings and another URL to an actual file with data in it.

Imagine being able to imbed information in any application similar to how you can easily imbed a YouTube video. 

In an effort to help accountants understand what a quality SEC XBRL financial filing looks like and how to differentiate quality filing from a marginal or even poor quality filing, I have put together a number of resources.

Documentation of characteristics

First, this document provides a summary of characteristics and some details which helps one see how to evaluate quality.  These characteristics seem hard to dispute.  The list may not yet be comprehensive, but I believe that it is a step in the right direction.  Here is a list of the high level characteristics:

• HTML and XBRL convey the same message
• Financial integrity
• Clear business meaning
• Consistency with peer groups
• Consistency between periods
• Justifiable extension concepts
• Appropriate rendering
• Usable by analysts

Prototype battery of validation reports

Second, in support of those characteristics and to help better understand the characteristics, I created a battery of validation reports.  You can get to this prototype here.  Look closely at this prototype, there is really a lot to see. Notice that the reports are relevant to proving the characteristics listed above.

Model/Reference implementation

Third, I have been nurturing along a model or reference implementation of an SEC XBRL financial filing. This is the latest instantiation of that model. While the model is not a large SEC XBRL financial filing, it does cover all the bases.  It is this filing which is being validated using the battery of validation reports above.

Education

Finally, if you don't understand what you are looking at, you really can't possibly judge good from bad.  This web page contains the document Understanding SEC XBRL Financial Filings.  It provides a solid framework for and details needed to grasp XBRL.  It does not provide everything you need, but it certainly provides a solid foundation upon which to build.