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 April 6, 2014 - April 12, 2014

Updated XBRL-Based Financial Report Ontology Prototype

Yesterday I posted this.  I adjusted this creating the following significant updates.

  1. I added presentation relations for everything.
  2. I created one schema which combines everything together, see "All Combined" below.
  3. I changed the cycles attribute on the arcroles I am providing from "none" to "undirected". I was getting some cycle errors; the cycles are OK where I have them.
  4. I updated the Financial Report Ontology a bit, adjusting and adding some things.

Here are the most current versions: (If you are not technical but interested in this, you want this HTML.)

  • All combined: XSD | HTML | XML
  • Financial Report Ontology (fro): XSD | HTML | XML
  • Topics: XSD
  • Disclosures: XSD
  • Key ratios: XSD
  • Fundamental accounting concepts (fac): XSD
  • Fundamental accounting concept rules (XBRL Calculations): XSD
  • Fundamental accounting concept rules (XBRL Formula): XBRL Formula
  • Map US GAAP XBRL Taxonomy to fundamental accounting concepts: XBRL Definitions
  • Arcroles (which provide semantics): XSD

What I want to do next is decouple the schemas and linkbases, making this more modular.  I have documentation and references for a lot of stuff, want to provide that and references.

Most of this information is in a Microsoft Access database. All the XBRL is generated via software, no XBRL taxonomy editor necessary.

Posted on Wednesday, April 9, 2014 at 01:30PM by Registered CommenterCharlie in , | CommentsPost a Comment | EmailEmail | PrintPrint

XBRL-Based Financial Report Ontology Prototype

I was trying to articulate a financial report ontology using OWL.  I did not really like what I created because I did not understand it and very few, if any, other business users understood it.  How can you tell if the ontology is correct if business users don't understand what they are looking at?

And so I did the same thing using XBRL (prototype).  See the graphic below. This is not perfect, but it is WAY, WAY closer to being understandable.  Plus it meets the needs of business users because computations can be easily articulated using XBRL Formula and XBRL calculation relations.

While I am not totally convinced that I can really call this an ontology, it certainly has a significantly higher level of semantics than most XBRL taxonomies that are being created.

Here is the XBRL taxonomy schemas for the pieces of this:

The primary thing that I was trying to do in OWL is to get one graph of all the "things" which play a role in a financial report.  Well, I now have that.

I am not saying that all of this is correct.  Got something better?  Let me know.  Have ideas for improvements? Send me an email.

 

 

Posted on Tuesday, April 8, 2014 at 09:47AM by Registered CommenterCharlie in | CommentsPost a Comment | EmailEmail | PrintPrint