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.

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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 from October 24, 2010 - October 30, 2010

Game Changer: XBRL Viewer Add on for Firefox

I was just made aware of something which will change the XBRL landscape. Someone has created an XBRL add on for Firefox which allows you to view any XBRL instance or XBRL taxonomy. The XBRL add on lets you drag and drop the dimensions, reorganizing them like a pivot table! The really cool thing is that the add on is free.

To get Firefox and the XBRL Add on and start viewing XBRL instances and XBRL taxonomies differently:

Get and install Firefox. I installed Firefox on my Mac.
Get the add on. Be sure to get Firefox first. Simply copy the link into the address of your newly installed Firefox browser: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/77192/versions/?page=1#version-0.5.6l
Get some XBRL instances. Here is an RSS feed with about 53 XBRL instances. Or, try this list of SEC XBRL filings. (Open the link, click on Detail the "Detail" column which takes you to the SEC web site, and then click on the XBRL instance.) Here is a direct link to one SEC XBRL instance, Coca Cola.

Again, be sure you are in Firefox when you open the XBRL instance or XBRL taxonomy.

So what does this mean? Well, one thing it means is that it is easier to see data modeling errors within XBRL taxonomies which drive the XBRL instances.

I am sure this means other things but my mind is not working right now because this is so exciting. Two things I wish: (a) I wish there were a plugin for Excel like this and, (b) I wish you could combine two or more XBRL instances and do comparisons.

More later.

Posted on Friday, October 29, 2010 at 09:01AM by