Digital Financial Reporting

One of the most frustrating things in my life is getting a treeview control to do what I want in Excel.  Treeview controls seem very illogical to me in VBA.  Now, in VB.Net this is a different story, they make far more sense.

And because of all the trees or hierarchies you have to deal with when working with XBRL, this adds to the frustration.

I can point to two resources which help semi-technical people trying to work with treeviews:

• This is an article which explains the fundamentals of using a treeview control.
• This is an Excel workbook which has a treeview control in it. Someone gave me this code seven or eight years ago and I have used it over, and over, and over.  I modified it slightly to make it easier to use, but it is good code which can be reverse engineered.
• ADDED: Someone sent me this great tutorial on using the treeview control in Micorosoft Access.
• ADDED: Another person sent me this set of tips which is also very helpful.
• ADDED: Another good reference http://mytreeviewblog.blogspot.com/
• ADDED: MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa443492(VS.60).aspx

If you run across any documentation which explains working with treeview controls in non-technical terms I would really like to have that documentation.

I am still experimenting, but what I have been able to do this far is to use the core financial semantics analysis set of 5525 SEC XBRL filings as a base, take the top 100 of those filings, and generate a reorganized version of that information which serves as a set of examples.

You can find these exemplars of the top 100 SEC XBRL financial filings here.

There are a number of different views, so let me explain them a bit:

• List of Companies: This is a list of the top 100 companies in terms of total assets reported. These 100 are a subset of the complete list of 5525 which you can find here. Note that this list does include filings which do not comply with the core financial reporting semantic model.
• Complete taxonomy: This provides a way to look at the complete taxonomy (the presentation relations) for each of those 100 filings.
• Organization of Pieces: This list takes the complete taxonomy, breaks it into individual pieces, and then lets you look at an individual piece by filer.  For example, on the top of that page you see "Document Information (by Filer)".  Click on that an a list of filers appears in the bottom area of the left hand pane.  Click on a company name and you can see the document information portion of the taxonomy for that specific filer.  Click on other filers and compare how each filer reports document information.  Click on other things such as balance sheet, income statement, income tax disclosure, etc. Nice way to compare.
• RDF List: My list is driven by this XML based list of companies, a pointer to their XBRL instance and more importantly a pre-processed XML infoset of the relations within their taxonomy.  This is imortant because a computer can understand this list and read it.
• Taxonomy Relations Infoset: This is a rendering of the XBRL taxonomy presentation relations for the taxonomy of the filing for a filer.  This rendering is not intended for humans, it is intended for computers.  It is not XBRL, rather it is an infoset expressed in an easier to understand and work with XML rendering of that information.  In this case it is for the first entry in that RDF file.

My HTML rendering is simply a recasting of the information from the SEC XBRL financial filings in the EDGAR database into a form which is useful for a specific purpose: to compare filings and provide examples. I am showing all these steps so that people can understand how the HTML is generated and how the information is derived.

More importantly, imagine a software application being able to read those XBRL files.  Imagine all this information being available within a software application for creating SEC XBRL financial filings.  Why would you need that? Why do people use the AICPA publication Accounting Trends and Techniques? Same reason.

But there is a big difference. The AICPA version is a survey of 600 companies.  My list is of 100, but that is only for my testing, I will expand this to all 5525 in my set.  The AICPA only does 600 because they create that publication manually.  My process will be fully automated.  The AICPA version is in the form of a book with a limited number of pages.  My version will have no limits as it exists on the Internet. I can provide much more information such as specializations by industry, specific accounting topics, etc.

The biggest difference is, however, is that my list will provide metadata for software applications. The AICPA version is for humans to read.

So basically, imagine Accounting Trends and Techniques tightly integrated into a software application used for creating financial statements.  Seems pretty useful to me.

What do you think of the idea? The entire SEC EDGAR XBRL financial filings database as a helpful resource for creating financial statements. Sort things by industry, by financial reporting topic, by whatever one might find useful.

I am updating my lists of exemplars, cycling back and making everything consistent. If you don't know what I am talking about when I say exemplar, search this blog site and/or read Modeling Business Information Using XBRL.

More to come.