Digital Financial Reporting

If I had a tool for creating zero defect (sigma level 6 quality) US GAAP and/or IFRS general purpose financial reports leveraging intelligent XBRL-based structured information and I could create those reports faster than you can create financial reports today, incurring less costs than you incur today, and with a higher quality level than the financial reports that you create today; then would you buy that tool?

What if the tool had all the necessary pieces, it was complete.  What if the tool was easy to use.  What if the tool was inexpensive.

Do you know how to build such a tool?  Do you know the proper technologies to employ to create the tool?  If you are a business professional, do you understand how to specify such a tool?

Leap frog the competition: Intelligent XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting

No magic. Skillful execution.  Attention to detail.  Quality of a master craftsmen. Engineering excellence. Steve Jobs would be happy.

Purpose-build for disclosure management and financial report creation, intelligent XBRL-based digital financial reporting products collect information about financial report creation projects and allow this information to be coordinated across all other representations of the project, so that every statement, policy, and disclosure is based on internally consistent and complete information from the same underling financial information database. Risk of noncompliance is minimized.  Cost of compliance is minimized. Effort to comply is minimized.

All the information provided by this resource is released into the public domain.  Two key pieces of the resource are a summary of the background information necessary to understand the problem correctly and a conceptual model that pushes the technical aspects into the background, freeing professional accountants from technical details so they can focus on the accounting and reporting.

Next step? Turn the vision into a reality.  Stay tuned.

XBRL International has published a candidate recommendation for the XBRL Open Information Model (OIM) 1.0.  XBRL International defines OIM as follows:

The Open Information Model provides a syntax-independent model for XBRL data, allowing reliable transformation of XBRL data into other representations.

My personal view here is that this is a good step in the right direction, but there is not really anything that is "XBRL data".  XBRL is a technical syntax.  There is "financial data" and there is "nonfinancial data" and either of those types of data, or information really, can be represented using the XBRL technical syntax.

What is still missing is a global standard conceptual model for business information, including financial information.  Until that global standard model exists, here is the conceptual model that I am using.  I arrived at that by reverse-engineering XBRL-based public company financial reports which were submitted to the SEC.

My conceptual model has a significantly deeper level of meaning than is provided by the XBRL International OIM.