Digital Financial Reporting

In an article written by CFO Magazine Data-Tagging: New Push for a Global Standard, Gargi Ray, manager of technical accounting for global outsourcer Infosys says the following:

"XBRL aligns data with broad concepts, such as revenue, which seems to have helped the conversion to IFRS. Aligning accounting concepts that match up with IFRS concepts makes the migration to the international standards relatively easy compared to migrating spreadsheet-based financial statements"

People have talked, and talked, and talked for years about creating a mapping between IFRS and US GAAP using XBRL.  From what I hear, there is at least one Big 4 CPA firm which is already creating what amounts to a mapping between IFRS and US GAAP.  Whether they will make this mapping available to others is not understood.

I don't understand why the SEC, AICPA, the FASB, or the IASCF has not seen fit (or realized how helpful) such a mapping would be to the process of moving from US GAAP to IFRS enough to actually coordinated the creation of such a mapping which could be made available to everyone.  Seems that it is in their interest if they want people to make this move.

There are people who both understate and overstate the difficulty of creating such a mapping.  And frankly, I personally would not really call this a mapping, but rather a "mapping reconciliation".  Seems to me that the difference between IFRS and US GAAP is quite similar to the difference between tax accounting and US GAAP (i.e. external reporting).

Even better than a mapping/reconciliation would be a Wiki which provides this information.  Combining the characteristics of XBRL, the characteristics of a Wiki, and characteristics and functionality of the Web would create a very powerful tool, seems to me.

You could even take this one step further and create a physical reconcilation template using XBRL which any company could use to articulate their financial information in BOTH IFRS and US GAAP and show every reconciling item between the two sets of numbers.  That would help accountants see the real value of XBRL and also help the transition to IFRS.

Altova announces support for XBRL, per an Altova Press Release today.  Here is the first part of the press release. (See the full press release linked to above)

Altova Introduces Version 2009 of its MissionKit Tool Suite

THE ALTOVA MISSIONKIT 2009 DELIVERS COMPREHENSIVE SUPPORT FOR XBRL AND HL7 INDUSTRY STANDARDS, EXTENDED DATABASE FUNCTIONALITY, AND MORE

BEVERLY, Mass., February 3, 2009 – Altova® ( http://www.altova.com), creator of XMLSpy® the industry leading XML editor, today announced the availability of Version 2009 (v2009) of the Altova MissionKit®, an integrated suite of XML, database, and UML tools. Version 2009 adds a host of powerful new features and functionality across multiple tools in the MissionKit, including comprehensive support for the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) standard and native database support for SQL Server® 2008, Oracle® 11g, and PostgreSQL 8. The release of Version 2009 also includes functionality for working with the Health Level Seven (HL7) standard in MapForce®, along with new database differencing capabilities in DatabaseSpy® and DiffDog®, and much more. Additionally, Altova has decided to pass savings realized due to the currently favorable US$/EUR exchange rate directly to its customers – and is decreasing its US$ prices across the entire Version 2009 product line.