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.

The author of this web site assumes all responsibility for this web site and it's content. The views expressed on this web site are the views of the author and may not represent the views of his employer.

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 Smart data (1)

Smart Data/Applications

Are you building or buying the right software applications? This presentation, Semantics Overview, helps you understand if you are.

Smart data/applications:

Knowledge baked in
New knowledge can be inferred/added
Agility to adapt to ever-changing conditions
Semi-automated data integration
Machine intelligence

I predict that you will see digital financial reporting applications with these characteristics in 1 to 2 years. But, before software applications can work in this manner, they need the right metadata. The metadata is key to making them work.

These applications will work better than today's legacy software applications for creating financial reports such as Microsoft Word which have no knowledge or understanding of financial reports or financial reporting. These applications will generate perfectly modeled XBRL output without their users ever having to understand anything about the XBRL technical syntax.

Not only are these types of software applications inevitable, they are imminent. Like I said, 1 to 2 years. Seem hard to believe? Well, I have mentioned these sorts of things pretty much every year for the past 14 years, for example here in 2009. I sometimes described this sort of application as something like a "modifiable TuboTax" type application for creating financial reports, driven by metadata.

Users won't adopt digital financial reporting and these types of applications because of regulatory mandates; they will adopt digital financial reporting because it is better and easier than today's approach. Hard to believe given today's XBRL software. However, once you see this software you will become a believer.

This is what XBRL has always been about; semantic, model based, structured authoring. The ability to exchange this information between software applications and analysis is a byproduct.

Check out the presentation, decide for yourself, place your bets on the table.

For more information, read the PWC paper on Disclosure Management and the Project10X executive summary.

Posted on Wednesday, January 2, 2013 at 07:51AM by