Digital Financial Reporting

I have added additional reports which show, in human readable form, the components of the US GAAP Taxonomy.  See the same place as the other reports.  Added per entry point for Banking and Savings; Other Industries such as extractive industries, health care, etc; and SEC specific disclosures.

Based on feedback from others received thus far, Excel seems to be the preferred format.  This makes sense as then it is easy to do pretty much what you want.  If there is anyone who cannot live with Excel please let me know and creating a PDF is as easy as printing the Excel to PDF.

By doing this what I am noticing is that there will likely be a lot of different entry points people might like.  The extremes are:

• no entry point and then the user needs to build their own from all of the existing components (which means they need to FIND those components)
• start with everything you could possibly want and then "prune" that list, removing what you don't want (for example, it is unlikely that any company would report both a direct and indirect cash flow statement and is both a corporation and a partnership therefore using both statements of changes in equity)
• start with the common components (for example, most filers with the SEC I would speculate use an indirect cash flow statement and are corporations)

During a little instance document creation symposium people who were not familar could not figure out exactly where to start.  Business users are certainly not going to roam around the subdirectories trying to find the pieces which they need to use.  Hopefully software developers will create useful wizards which ask the user questions such as "are you a corporation or a partnership" and "what industry are you in" and "do you use a direct or indirect method of reporting your cash flows", and then create the entry point neede by the user.

I am getting a lot of questions related to the US GAAP Taxonomy and dimensions.  I am also getting requests for training materials in that area.  Currently, if you are a bit technical there is some pretty good information in the FRUX book (Financial Reporting Using XBRL), chapter 14 "Understanding and Using XBRL Dimensions."

But WARNING!  That material was written almost two years ago when I had a far, far less understanding of XBRL Dimensions.  I also gave a class at the XBRL International Conference in Munich (June 2007) on the very basics of XBRL Dimensions.  Since that time we went through the process of trying to decide if and how to use XBRL Dimensions in the US GAAP Taxonomy and I have learned a boatload more about XBRL Dimensions, how they work, etc.

Yesterday a group of us has a little mini symposium on instance document creation here in Tacoma and I learned something else about XBRL Dimensions that I did not know.  Basically we realized that as the public taxonomy stands it is possible to create two valid versions of the same instance document, which is a bad thing in my mind.  I remembered that the COREP taxonomy was doing some funky stuff with empty hypercubes, and now I know why...to solve the issue we ran across yesterday.

The taxonomy can be constructed to hide literally all of what appears to business users as complexity relating to XBRL Dimensions.  There has been, and still is, a lot of misunderstanding about what is trying to be achieved with XBRL Dimensions.  The key here is to minimize the burden on business users for reporting using XBRL.  The way to do this is to not use XBRL Dimensions less, it is to use it correctly and typically more as the dimensional information is something that a computer software application can use to make the business user's life easier, not harder.  The thing is that most software developers are not implmenting their software (at least what I have seen) appropriately.  Appropriately is not defined as following the XBRL Dimensions specification to the letter...it is about using the dimensional meta data to help the user out.  I am not really seeing that in software.

On my list of things to provide is information which will help business users understand what they need to understand about the use of XBRL Dimensions within the US GAAP Taxonomy.  My goal is to never use the term XBRL Dimensions.  The problem is that it is hard to do that with the current state of software.  I will figure something out.

The US GAAP Taxonomy is an amazing piece of work, even if you don't use XBRL for financial reporting.  I mean, take a look at this information!  When I was an auditor, I would have killed for a listing of all the possible balance sheet line items or to know all those different steps within in income statement.  It was hard to figure out what the balance sheet line items were, what order they should go in, etc.  I never was that great an accountant.  Now, I have the benefit of the knowlege of lots of accountants who are a lot smarter than me.  How cool is that!

Also, I never really could figure out what came first:  Minority Interest in Net Income, Extraordinary Items, or Income from Discontinued Operations; let alone the proper terminology.  If you look at the taxoomy, it is all there.

Never before (that I am aware of) has US GAAP, or the portion used for presentation and disclosure of financial information, been organized in this manner, so comprehensively, by industry.

Or, am I missing something?