Digital Financial Reporting

Someone pointed out to me that you can order XBRL for Dummies from Amazon.com for $19.79 currently.  The normal price is $29.99.  Also, it appears that the book will ship October 22, 2009.  Not sure why Amazon.com dropped the price.

The first XBRL US Pacific Rim Technology Workshop and Summitwill be held July 28 to 30 in Santa Clara, California.  The event is designed to bring together XML and XBRL experts from around the world to brainstorm, generate ideas and educate each other on advanced topics.  Per the conference web page above, this includes: 

• Real-world case studies that describe taxonomy development and maintenance processes including US GAAP, IFRS and corporate actions from around the world, e.g., US, China, Europe, Japan
• Advanced topics in development including tagging, rendering, versioning, data quality and validation, database and business intelligence
• Practical taxonomy maintenance workshop
• Speakers with XBRL expertise from organizations such as Hitachi, Fujitsu, CoreFiling, Rivet Software, Just Systems, UBmatrix, Ernst & Young, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), SWIFT, and Morningstar, among others

In a story posted to the Netherlands SBR project web site, an announcement was made that three major banks in the Netherlands are going to use Standard Business Reporting for the granting of credit.  The implementations should be completed by the end of 2009, automating the delivery of credit reports via computerized information exchange processes.

Standard Business Reporting (I have also heard Standardized Business Reporting) is the term I believe the Australian Taxonomy Project coined which was then adopted by what was the Dutch Taxonomy Project which is not being referred to as the Dutch SBR project.

This is interesting to me for two reasons.  The first reason is that in the United States a bank was experimenting with accepting information from businesses either seeking credit or having credit and having to provide periodic reports to the financial institution using XBRL.  Not sure what happened to that project.  I would suspect that banks will be all over XBRL for receiving this periodic financial information in support of their credit.  It cannot be much fun for banks to key this information in each month in order to track their credit.

The second interesting thing is the term Standard Business Reporting.  That term was used, and not XBRL, in the link above.  Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand and others have Standard Business Reporting.  The US Securities and Exchange Commission has their term for XBRL which is "interactive data".  Perhaps this is the beginning of the trend most people would like to see which is for XBRL to disappear into the background, never really to be seen...just doing its job enabling these sorts of information exchanges.