Digital Financial Reporting

OK, try and wrap your head around this.  I cannot seem to get all this totally at the moment, but I am pretty sure this notion is an important.

How are you made aware of financial information today?  Say a company issues a financial statement or a press release making people aware of some sort of information.  What, a press release is posted on their web site or through a wire service or something?  Either you have to go to the web site or a search engine has to find the information and then make you aware of it with some sort of an alert.

Seems that this works backwards from how it could work.  Think about how a blog works.  Why can't notification of financial reports work in that manner, like a blog?  Or a pod cast?

Let's call this FinCasting?  (I just made up the term). 

The SEC provided an RSS feed to XBRL documents filed under the XBRL Voluantary Filing Program several years ago.  I don't know that this is that feed, but here is a current RSS feed the SEC provides to XBRL documents:  http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/xbrlrss.xml

Now, the SEC also modified their system to provide information feeds about filings received.  It looks like the SEC is using ATOM feeds for each filer, providing a means to subscribe to a company's filings, being notified every time a new filing is received for a company you subscribe to.  Here is such a feed to Microsoft filings.  There are other feeds you can subscribe to, based on a conversation with someone from the SEC just to check to be sure that this works how it seems to work.  For example, you can subscribe to a list of recent filings or you could subscribe to a list of particular types of filings, such as only 10-Ks.

The reason all this came up for me is that I was reading this book about Podcasting yesterday and I realized that I had been missing a big point about how I was looking at RSS feeds.  I was looking at them as a mechanism to physically link to a collection of one or more XBRL instance documents.  I missed the "notification" piece.

I talked to someone else about this, just to help me understand what I was seeing, and they sent me some useful links and I added some others:

• Web feeds per Wikipedia "is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content."  Not sure what "frequently" means.
• RSS per Wikipedia is a web feed format.  This appears to be the most popular format.
• ATOM per Wikipedia is another feed format.  It is supposed to be better than RSS.
• Notification, again per Wikipedia,  seems to be a way web services can talk to each other and share information.  This seems to have a role in this.
• IBM discusses web services notificationand describes them as "WS-Notification is a family of related white papers and specifications that define a standard Web services approach to notification using a topic-based publish/subscribe pattern."
• Feedhause.com (http://www.feedhaus.com) is a feed aggregator.  This is an interesting idea, seems to put feeds together and create other "super feeds" as best I can figure.
• Mashups seems to have a role in this also, per Wikipediaboiles down to "drawn from pre-existing sources, to create a new derivative work".

What if you could hook an Excel model of some sort (i.e. financial model) to an RSS or ATOM or some other feed which would notify you proactively (i.e. push it to you; you don't have to rely on search engines finding that the information exists) and your model updates based on this new information which has been pushed to you.

More specific example, say an analysis program monitored certain rations, watching them until there was some sort of exception and then a human could get involved to investigate further.  Oh, even simpler, what if a price list was made available in XBRL and changes to the prices list could be automatically communicated to those who need to know about such changes.

"FinCasting" or "XBRL InformationCasting" or "data casting"; basically rather than a web page you can read or a podcast you can listen to, a data or information set which you use within your analysis models.  Man, imagine the possibilities.

The SEC has a lot of data.  Imagine being able to create a mash up that does something like, oh I don't know all the different types of data the SEC has, maybe someone can help us up with a comment and provide an example of what might be possible.

If this seems a bit of a ramble, well, that is because it is.  Not to clear on all this at the present time. 

Geoff Zakaib, the Director of Energy, Utilities & Mining Advisory Services for PricewaterhouseCoopers pointed out to me that the US Securities and Exchange Commission will likely be using XBRL as part of their modernization of oil and gas disclosures.

The final ruling can be found on the SEC web site, see pages 94 and 95.  Section VIII. Application of Interactive Data Format to Oil and Gas Disclosures states in part:

"In the Proposing Release, we sought comment on the desirability of rules that would permit, or require, oil and gas companies to present the tabular disclosures in Subpart 1200 in interactive data format in addition to the currently required format. Most commenters addressing the topic supported the use of XBRL for oil and gas disclosures. They believed using interactive data would be very helpful to investors and analysts."

Making this information available to investors and analysts in this manner is great, but consider how economists might be able to use this type of information.  Imagine economists being able to do a rather simple query and tie their models directly to the information disclosed in the financial statements of every oil and gas company.  Heck, why limit it to just oil and gas companies?

Today, gathering this information can be an excruciating process involving humans rekeying quite a lot of information.  Tomorrow, because the reduced effort of gathering the information, more detailed information can be gathered and used in economic and other models.  Also, because the time involved in gathering the information is less due to the automation of the process, the information will be available sooner.

Financial disclosures of public companies and nonfinancial oil and gas disclosures is a great start and it is great that the SEC is starting this process.  But imagine other places these same techniques for collecting and using this information could be useful.

If people have other ideas where XBRL might be useful in collecting and redistributing information, please leave a comment.