Digital Financial Reporting

I through together a quick and dirty accounting policy viewer prototype using the SECXBRL.info web service API.  There are two interfaces, both of which are HTML based.  This one is HTML5 and uses iFrames.  If that does not work for you, try this alternative interface which does not use iFrames (which I could have goofed up).

Some facts:

• Total time to create: about 2 hours. (Of course, I spent 3+ years working to understand SEC XBRL financial filings)
• Skills required: Accounting knowledge, Microsoft Access, XPath, Microsoft XML Parser, HTML (i.e. no XBRL knowledge required
• Number of filings searched: S&P 500 only
• Queries used: total of 2.  Step one was to find the filings which had the disclosure I was looking for, I picked us-gaap:AdvertisingCostsPolicyTextBlock.  Step two was to use the information returned from the step one query to get the actual policy for each of the companies which reported that policy.
• Number of text blocks available to query: Lots.  See here in HTML and here in XML.
• Value of XBRL-based information: Priceless.

Next step is to do more policies and create my first iPad/iPhone application! (Maybe)

Here is the Microsoft Access VBA code. Here is the Microsoft Access Database table.

Per SECXBRL.info 20% of the DOW 30 companies pass 100% of the fundamental accounting concept validation rules.  See the list here.

Of the 6 reporting entities which pass all of these validation criteria (DUPONT, 3M, Intel, GE, Microsoft, Cisco), two pass all for the first time in 2013 (DUPONT and Cisco).  You can see a comparison for 2011, 2012, and 2013 validation results here.

Half of the DOW 30 passes 90% or more of the fundamental accounting concept validation criteria.

I put together some example dimensional-type queries using the functionality of SECXBRL.info.  You can see and walk through the queries here, or if you want you can download this Excel spreadsheet which executes the queries and populates the Excel spreadsheet with the query results.

While Query 5 which shows a breakdown of assets by business segments is the sexiest example (see the results below), by working through all the examples you can start to see some issues you need to keep in mind when querying information across reporting entities.

(Click to view larger image)

Here is the result of another query of the business segments of the S&P 500. (This is the actual query syntax.)

I am not going to go into any more detail, you can fiddle with the examples on your own (all run on the DOW 30 so you don't need a subscription to the service).

One thing I will point out is how you can manage the reality that some filers have a dimension (or [Axis] they are also called), some do not, and sometimes different dimension-defaults are used by different filers.  Walk through the examples and you can see how you can manage all of that using the query.