Digital Financial Reporting

The comprehensive exampledigital financial report provides a good opportunity to better understand what an infoset is and how it is useful. What I will show here is that these intermediate infosets break the XBRL problem into two separate and distinct problems.

Here is a summary of the infosets I generate for the comprehensive example.  Provided are an HTML human readable rendering so you can see what the info set looks like, an SEC style infoset which uses the SEC logical model terminology, and a Business Reporting Logical Model (BRLM) style infoset which uses different terminology.

• Fact tables: Human readable (HTML), SEC style infoset (XML), BRLM style infoset (XML)
• Relations: Human readable (HTML), SEC style infoset (XML), BRLM style infoset (XML)
• Report elements: Human readable (HTML), SEC style infoset (XML), BRLM style infoset (not available)
• Business rules: Human readable (HTML), SEC style infoset (Coming soon), BRLM style infoset (not available)

From these infosets I created this Recap/examination utility. That recap/examination utility is nothing more than a reorganzation of the information within those infosets.  Well, I guess there are a couple other things I use.  I do use a valiation output report for calculations validation, business rules validation, and XBRL syntax validation. So, perhaps one might include those in the infoset.

Where do these infosets come from? They are generated by an XBRL processor.  Now, these infosets are not generated directly from an XBRL processor.  What I do is take the XBRL processor generated infoset which is rather technical in nature, not organized as I wish, and otherwise not what I desire; and I reorganize what the XBRL processor generates using XSLT.  This is a daunting task, and you definitely need an XBRL processor to do this correctly.

But once you have the infosets, the "problems" that you need to solve to make this information useful has nothing to do with XBRL any longer, it is a totally different problem and you don't need an XBRL processor at all.

For example, this is my rather lame attempt at rendering the information contained within the digital business report: rendering. This is what the information might look like in a printed document. That printed version is my target.  Not the "bold" or different sized fonts or other helpful formatting, but rather the formatting of the meaning of the information.  One needs a minimal amount of rendering to put in fact table into a usable, workable form.  Doing this has nothing to to with XBRL, it is all about recognizing the infoset.

In generating that rendering, I did not use XBRL at all.  Never had to touch anything related to XBRL.  It is all about organizing that fact table info set using the fact table, the relations, and the report elements.

My next step with that recap/examination utility is to solve the balance of the rendering issues.  There are two things I am not taking into account correctly because they are beyond my current programming skill level.  The first is leveraging the information model in the generation of the rendering.  You can see how the different information models should be rendered by looking at these metapatterns and business use caserenderings. I could probably figure this out, but I think I am going to seek out someone with programming skills to help me.  The second thing I need to do is deal with multiple [Axis] on columns and rows correctly.  If you look close at the renderings of the comprehensive example, there is only one [Axis] on each column and one on each row.  This is not the case with the metapatterns and business use cases.  Correcting these two issues will provide me with the renderings I am looking for.

I am not going to undertake the "interactive" piece of the rendering puzzle, making it so you can pivot the rendering like an Excel pivot table or how the Firefox add on pivots the rendering.  I will leave that up to people who really know what they are doing, too hard for me to.

So there you have it, the power of infosets.

An updated comprehensive example is available. While this is "feature complete" and makes the primary points necessary, I am going to enhance certain aspects and create this in the style of an SEC XBRL financial filing.

The primary attribute of an XBRL report which this comprehensive example shows is the proper integrity of the different pieces of a business report.  The metapatterns and business use casesshow small, isolated examples which focus on a specific area.  The comprehensive examples pulls things together and focuses on the integrity of the pieces.

The best place to see the integrity is in the XBRL formulas validation results and in the navigation between components within a software application which supports such navigation. The Firefox XBRL add on is such a software application.

Stay tuned, lots of improvements are in store.

In about 2000 or so I began experimenting with XBRL, modeling typical business use cases in XBRL to see how it was done. I literally began collecting these use cases. Over the years I have created at least seven iterations of what got referred to as "patterns", but I now use the term metapatterns and business use cases.

My latest iteration of metapatterns and business use cases can help professionals during your journey to mastery of digital financial reporting, helping you to make proper use of XBRL. These metapatterns and patterns have come full cycle. Back in about 2007 we used these patterns to help understand how to best construct the US GAAP Taxonomy. Ultimately, I created a model or reference implementation of an SEC XBRL filing to understand how to properly express financial information using XBRL. I then took what I learned from creating the model/reference implementation, cycled back, and have reconstructed the metapatterns and business use cases in these current versions to reflect what I have learned.

There is one additional step these models require which is to recast the model/reference implementation following the metapatterns and business use cases. This is crucial because the model/reference implementation shows clearly how the different pieces of a digital financial report relate to one another. You cannot get this understanding from the metapatterns or business use cases to the extent necessary because they are generally isolated examples to keep them focused on specific areas.

Be aware that the metapatterns and business use cases assume that you have the appropriate understanding of fundamental information such as the multidimensional model, the US GAAP Taxonomy/SEC logical model, etc.  While one resource which contains all this fundamental background material does not yet exist, I have put together an organization of material in one location for your use which collectively has all these fundamentals, should you need that background.  You can find that information summarized here on my blog.

Stepping through this information in order is crucial; there are no short cuts. Trying to understand how to use XBRL properly but skipping steps is like trying to understand algebra without knowing how to count or basic mathematics. Mastering this material will be easier when XBRL software has matured and much of this information is absorbed within software applications which help you use these technologies correctly. But regretfully, that is not the state of XBRL software today. A good sign that you are missing fundamental understanding is frustration and confusion.

For professionals who are investing in their skill sets, mastery of XBRL will pay dividends as we move to the paradigm of digital financial reporting. Making this investment today is harder than it will be five years from now; but being on the leading edge of this change has its advantages.